Distributed Continual Planning for Unmanned Ground Vehicle Teams
Edmund H. Durfee · 1999
Some application domains highlight the importance of distributed continual planning concepts; coordinating teams of unmanned ground vehicles in dynamic environments is an example of such a domain. In this article, we illustrate the ideas in and promises of distributed continual planning by showing how acquiring and distributing operator intent among multiple semi-autonomous vehicles supports ongoing, cooperative mission elaboration and revision. Introduction An agent needs to be able to do Distributed Continual Planning (DCP) if its application domain has at least three characteristics. First, the application should require that an agent's success depends on choosing immediate actions that flow into good choices for future options. It is this longer-term view that motivates the use of planning such that an agent should decide between alternative anticipated sequences of activities; otherwise, the application might be better served with simpler reactive agents that only decide ...