Architecture for autonomous Distributed Real-time Embedded systems

Unmanned vehicles (UVs) have become more and more widely used. And augmenting their autonomy is an urgent demand in order to make them play a bigger role. This paper presents a multi-agent architecture for UVs Distributed Real-time Embedded (DRE) system. It can support the autonomous operation of UV from two aspects: (1) at the global, task scheduling among multi UVs can be completed autonomously based on a mixed negotiation mechanism with less communication overhead, taking various dynamic and stochastic factors into account, such as arrival of new task, risk of UV loss; (2) at the local, an Adaptive Resource Manager (ARM) is introduced. On basis of the feedback loop theory, it can improve the local autonomy by allocating resources efficiently and enabling the system to adapt to fluctuations in input workload, resource availability and operating conditions.