Coordinated rendezvous and surveillance for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) subject to actuator and sensor faults

In this thesis, the problem of employing multiple UAVs for carrying out a Coordinated Strike and a Multiple UAV Surveillance mission has been addressed. The goal of the Coordinated Strike mission is for multiple UAVs to cooperate in order to simultaneously arrive at a high priority target to carry out a coordinated strike. The coordination strategy is based on coordination variables and coordination functions. A distributed system architecture is proposed that allows vehicles to communicate coordinating information across the team without reliance on a central ground controller. Simulations have been conducted to illustrate the performance of the coordination strategy under an actuator fault in single and multiple vehicles. The Multiple UAV Surveillance problem has been investigated by developing a hypothetical Border Surveillance Mission, wherein a UAV team is tasked to monitor a region along a border between two countries. The goal of the UAVs is to cover the entire surveillance region, while minimizing the team cost, which is a function of each vehicle's fuel consumption and mission time. Three fault cases in a single vehicle in the team have been simulated, namely (1) actuator; (2) sensor; and (3) simultaneous actuator and sensor faults. These faults necessitate a resource allocation problem to be solved, which is used to determine the configuration of the team engaged in the surveillance mission. The team chosen to perform the surveillance mission is the one that incurs the minimum cost for performing the mission

Conditional Preferences for Social Systems

The design of artificial decision-making systems must be founded on some notion of rationality. Conventional multi-agent decision-making methodologies, such as von Neumann-Morgenstern game theory, are based on the paradigm of individual rationality, which requires decision makers to take the action that is best for themselves, regardless of its effect on other decision makers. Relaxing the demand for the "best possible" decision, however, opens the way to accommodate the preferences of others. Satisficing game theory is a new approach to multi-agent decision making that permits decision makers to adjust their preferences in a controlled way to give consideration to others by permitting conditional preferences whereby a decision maker is able to adjust its preferences as a function of the preferences of others