As multiple and heterogenous unmanned vehicle systems continue to play an
increasingly important role in addressing complex missions in the real world,
the need for effective cooperation among unmanned vehicles becomes paramount.
The concept of autonomous cooperation, wherein unmanned vehicles cooperate
without human intervention or human control, offers promising avenues for
enhancing the efficiency and adaptability of intelligence of
multiple-heterogeneous unmanned vehicle systems. Despite the growing interests
in this domain, as far as the authors are concerned, there exists a notable
lack of comprehensive literature on defining explicit concept and classifying
levels of autonomous cooperation of multiple-heterogeneous unmanned vehicle
systems. In this aspect, this article aims to define the explicit concept of
autonomous cooperation of multiple-heterogeneous unmanned vehicle systems.
Furthermore, we provide a novel criterion to assess the technical maturity of
the developed unmanned vehicle systems by classifying the autonomous
cooperative levels of multiple-heterogeneous unmanned vehicle systems