An ASP-Based Architecture for Autonomous UAVs in Dynamic Environments: Progress Report

Traditional AI reasoning techniques have been used successfully in many domains, including logistics, scheduling and game playing. This paper is part of a project aimed at investigating how such techniques can be extended to coordinate teams of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in dynamic environments. Specifically challenging are real-world environments where UAVs and other network-enabled devices must communicate to coordinate—and communication actions are neither reliable nor free. Such network-centric environments are common in military, public safety and commercial applications, yet most research (even multi-agent planning) usually takes communications among distributed agents as a given. We address this challenge by developing an agent architecture and reasoning algorithms based on Answer Set Programming (ASP). ASP has been chosen for this task because it enables high flexibility of representation, both of knowledge and of reasoning tasks. Although ASP has been used successfully in a number of applications, and ASP-based architectures have been studied for about a decade, to the best of our knowledge this is the first practical application of a complete ASP-based agent architecture. It is also the first practical application of ASP involving a combination of centralized reasoning, decentralized reasoning, execution monitoring, and reasoning about network communications. This work has been empirically validated using a distributed network-centric software evaluation testbed and the results provide guidance to designers in how to understand and control intelligent systems that operate in these environments.