Model-predictive target defense by team of unmanned surface vehicles operating in uncertain environments

In this paper, we present a heuristic planning approach for guarding a valuable asset by a team of autonomous unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) operating in a continuous state-action space. The team´s objective is to maximize the amount of time it takes an intruder boat to reach the asset. The team must cooperatively deal with uncertainty about which boats are actual intruders, employ active blocking to slow down intruders´ movement towards the asset, and intelligently distribute themselves around the target to optimize future guarding opportunities. Our planner incorporates a market-based algorithm for allocating tasks to individual USVs by forward-simulating the mission and assigning estimated utilities to candidate task-allocation plans. The planner can be automatically adapted to a specific mission by optimizing the behaviors used to fulfil individual tasks. We present detailed simulation results that demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.