Market-Based Collaborations for Autonomous Operations of Unmanned Air Vehicles

UAVs are a key element of the U.S. Army's vision for force transformation. UAVs are employed in large numbers per future combat system (FCS) unit of action (UoA). This necessitates a multi-UAV level of autonomous collaboration behavior capability that meets RSTA and other mission needs of the FCS UoAs. The autonomous collaborative mission systems (ACMS) are an extensible architecture and behavioral planning/collaborative approach to achieve this level of capability. We present a market-based approach that we developed as the main mechanism for autonomous collaboration in the ACMS. To enable flexible collaboration among a variety of heterogeneous unmanned vehicles for a broad range of missions, this market-based collaboration approach adopts a two-stage task specification and negotiation process that can accommodate different mission planning and task allocation strategies. We describe our market-based approach, its main features, and the collaboration protocol in this article