On-the-Fly Decentralized Tasking of Autonomous Vehicles

This paper proposes a cooperative task allocation and execution strategy for a group of agents with different capabilities to accomplish a mission autonomously. For each local agent, a hierarchical and modular Behavior tree (BT) is synthesized to coordinate a sequence of actions to accomplish a task either individually or in collaboration with other agents. To facilitate the coordination among agents and the task assignment process, a market-based auction algorithm is embedded in the developed framework. The details of the developed algorithm are illustrated through different examples, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed approach.