Cooperative task scheduling for networked uninhabited air vehicles

In the work presented here, we study a cooperative control problem for a network of uninhabited air vehicles (UAVs) where it is assumed that after deployment a set of tasks is given to a group of UAVs and the UAVs must cooperate to decide which UAV should process each task. The cooperation must occur during real-time operation due to a need to repeatedly process each task, in spite of imperfect communications (e.g., messages with random but bounded delays), and the possibility that tasks "pop-up." We show how to view this as a cooperative scheduling problem, and how to derive bounds on mission-level performance metrics. Simulations are used to compare the approach with a noncooperative strategy and to provide design guidelines for the cooperative scheduler.