Multi-UAV task allocation with communication faults

Most of the multi-agent coordination algorithms depend on communication to make cooperative decisions. However, the multi-agent system may be subject to partial or total communication failures. Designing coordination algorithms taking communication failures into account is a difficult task. In this paper, we develop behavior based coordination algorithms for agents having partial communication failure resulting from a receiver or transmission failure, and total communication failure where the receiver and transmitter of the agent has failed. The algorithm modifies the behavior of faulty and non-faulty agents depending on the type of failure. With modified behaviors, the non-faulty agents accommodate the faulty agents in accomplishing the tasks. Monte-Carlo simulations are carried out to validate the performance of the developed algorithms. The results show that the system with coordination mechanism performs close to that of the system with no communication failure agents, while it outperforms the system in which the communication failure agents are neglected.