Network enabled cooperation of autonomous vehicles: A communications perspective

In this paper we present the NECSAVE system which allows the control of heterogeneous unmanned vehicles under challenging environments by a single human operator by providing it with the desired highlevel objectives. The described software stack takes care of decomposing the high-level objectives into assignable tasks and (re)distributing the workload among team members according to their announced capabilities and eventual failures. NECSAVE is robust to system failures by supporting decentralized planning and adapting allocation in face of platform losses. The system was validated in multiple field trials where NECSAVE was used for the coordination of heterogeneous vehicles under challenged communication environments, namely the sea using radio (at surface) and acoustic communications (underwater).