Controlled Vehicle Exchange and Allocation in Dynamic Teams

Here, we present a solution for safe switching amongst dynamic teams of autonomous vehicles. By team, we mean a collection of vehicles that have a common mission, or objective. The design of our solution involves a distributed hierarchical control architecture. It contains five levels that successively abstract the motion of a single vehicle into maneuvers, coordinated maneuvers, tasks and team objectives. We do this in the framework of dynamic networks of hybrid automata and sliding mode control. We establish an information interchange protocol that minimizes bandwidth use and ensures robustness in the switching process, yet allows for communications at all levels of the control architecture. We present results from simulations to demonstrate and implement these ideas.