Process Assessment Module and Task Assignment Module (PAM-TAM) for the autonomous sensors replanning in the skyISTAR Unmanned Aerial System

This article resumes work carried out jointly by the I&R team of the skyISTAR program, the Facoltà di Ingegneria (Engineering Faculty) of Pavia University (UniPv) for the PAM application and the Dipartimento di Informatica (Information Technology Department) of Turin University (UniTo) for the TAM application. The project has the scope of providing the skyISTAR UAS with autonomous capabilities for data collection, assessment and Sensor Re-planning. The PAM collects information about events incoming in real-time from the system during a mission, including the status of the sensors, the occurrence of new targets, and the presence of threats. The PAM delivers them to the TAM, which is a decision support module, implemented as an agent capable of re-planning the use of sensors and of resolving conflicts. The decision capabilities are implemented as a rule-based system and the (re)scheduling of sensor tasks along the time line is approached by temporal reasoning mechanisms. A description of the integration of these modules into skyISTAR is hereby presented and the results of the test are shown.