The Design and Implementation of Autonomous Mission Manager for Small UAVs

Autonomy is very important for advanced uninhabited air vehicles (UAVs). Based on the intelligent agent technique, hierarchy and hybrid agent structure is applied in the design and software implementation process of autonomous mission manager (AMM) for small UAVs. By acquiring the special knowledge and rich experiences of domain experts and operators, rule-based strategies under the cognitive Agent structure for top-layer of AMM are established. Further, we also designed the reactive rules under the productive Agent structure for the low mission plan execution layer. The design results have been implemented in the AMM of the small UAVs. The flight modes of the fully-autonomy and semi-autonomy are successfully demonstrated in the flight tests. The flight tests also have shown the effectiveness of the designed strategies and the rapid reactivity of the AMM to some contingency flight events.