ADAPTIVE AUTONOMY WITHUNRELIABLE COMMUNICATION

Abstract: For underwater robotics there exists severe constraints regarding wireless bandwidth in the kilobitsrange. This makes a centralised approach to high-level mission management possibly less thanideal due to inherent delays and possible temporary incompleteness in data during decision making.This thesis aims to propose, implement (in ROS) and test a distributed approach. An auction basedmethod for task assignment was being used, as well as a Pagerank based approach that models atrust based hierarchy between autonomous agents inferred from information exchange, in orderto enforce decision conformity. Simulations where carried out using UWsim and a custom madebandwidth limiter for ROS. It was concluded that the Pagerank based algorithm managed to upholdconformity and solve con icts during network slowdown but did not always lead to the correctdecisions being enforced.