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.
