Enabling fault recovery and adaptation in mine-countermeasures missions using ontologies

The work presented in this paper focuses on addressing vehicle hardware faults and changes in high level priorities during Mine Countermeasures (MCM) missions with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). The approach utilizes ontologies for representing knowledge about the vehicle and its operational environment and is based on the KnowRob system. Reasoning on the vehicle capabilities and consequently the actions it can execute is continuous and occurs in real time. Hardware faults are incorporated into the reasoning process as a means of driving adaptive planning and execution. The system utilizes the OPTIC Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) planner. Adaptive execution is prioritized over adaptive planning as mission planning can be very demanding in terms of computational resources. Changes in high level mission priorities are also addressed as part of the adaptive planning behaviour of the system. The main contribution of this paper is an ontological approach that drives an adaptive behaviour for increasing persistent autonomy of AUVs in unexpected situations. That is when hardware faults threaten to put the mission at risk and changes in high level mission priorities should be incorporated as part of decision making.