Agent-based Control of Autonomous Power Management on Unmanned Platforms

Uninhabited vehicles will be required to participate in increasingly complex missions with greater degrees of autonomy. To achieve this, it will be necessary to control power generation and consumption across the platform in an intelligent manner. This will ensure that overall mission goals are satisfied without compromising the safety and integrity of the system. In this paper, an agent-based software architecture is proposed to control power allocation on autonomous uninhabited vehicles. Our architecture features a hierarchical distributed decision framework for intelligent power management. Furthermore, robust mechanisms for protection against faults are discussed. The aim of this work is to use the Intelligent Electrical Power Networks Evaluation Facility (IEPNEF) as a test-bed for evaluating of the proposed architecture