Resource Welfare Based Task Allocation for UAV Team with Resource Constraints

TLDR: A distributed task allocation scheme based on resource welfare of which concept is adopted from economics is proposed to enable the UAV team to effectively utilize resources by balancing resource depletions and consequently be capable of smoothly responding to dynamic events by retaining more UAVs available.

Abstract: This paper addresses a task allocation problem for a team of UAVs that cooperatively performs a search and attack mission in an unknown region. The UAVs are heterogeneous carrying different types and amounts of munition resources, and limited in communications and sensing capabilities. The environment is highly uncertain and dynamic where no prior information is available and dynamic events such as UAV failures unpredictably occur. The objective of the mission is to maximize total reward obtained by destroying targets within a given mission horizon. A group of UAVs may need to be formed to attack a target because individual UAVs may not have sufficient resources for the execution of attack tasks. Instantaneous task allocation approaches that seek for optimal solution for current tasks cannot effectively account for the unpredictability of future tasks in the uncertain dynamic environment. In this paper, we propose a distributed task allocation scheme based on resource welfare of which concept is adopted from economics. The approach we present enables the UAV team to effectively utilize resources by balancing resource depletions and consequently be capable of smoothly responding to dynamic events by retaining more UAVs available. Simulation experiments were conducted in various conditions to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach in comparison with the instantaneous task allocation method. The results show that our approach improves the performance by up to 29.3 % with respect to the instantaneous task allocation method.