SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURE FOR SEMANTIC INFORMATION-SHARING IN UNMANNED CONVOYS

Sharing information among vehicles in an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) convoy allows for improved vehicle performance and reduces the need for each vehicle to be equipped with a full-suite of sensors. Information such as obstacle data, surface properties, and terrain maps are particularly useful for vehicle control and high-level behaviors. This paper describes a system architecture for sharing semantic information among vehicles in a convoy operation. This architecture is demonstrated by sharing terrain information between vehicles in a two-vehicle convoy in both simulation and on actual autonomous vehicles. Update rules fuse information from different sources in a statistical manner and allow for an onboard algorithm to make high-level decisions about the incoming data whether it be from its own sensors or semantic information from other vehicles.