Supervisory control of an unmanned land vehicle

Achieving autonomous operation by an unmanned vehicle in open terrain remains a challenging problem in the development of land vehicles. The main function of a supervisory controller is to monitor and coordinate the activities of the components such that the overall behavior of the vehicle meets certain requirements. In this article, we present the design of a supervisory control architecture and its preliminary implementation for a land vehicle capable of autonomous operation in open terrain. Under this architecture, supervisory control of the vehicle is achieved by uniformly adopting a "generic" state-transition structure for each component in the vehicle. This structure represents a subset of the behavior of each component that is recognized by the supervisory controller, which is designed with the objective of achieving certain behavior of the vehicle. Implication of adopting this state-transition structure on a possible formal synthesis of supervisory control is discussed.