Using Petri Net Plans for Modeling UAV-UGV Cooperative Landing

Use of cooperative multi vehicle team including aerial and ground vehicles has been growing rapidly over the last years, ranging from search and rescue to logistics. In this paper, we consider a cooperative landing task problem, where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) must land on an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) while such ground vehicle is moving in the environment to execute its own mission. To solve this challenging problem we consider the Petri Net Plans (PNPs) framework, an advanced planning specification framework, to effectively use different controllers in different conditions and to monitor the evolution of the system during mission execution so that the best controller is always used even in face of unexpected situations. Empirical simulation results show that our system can properly monitor the joint mission carried out by the UAV/UGV team, hence confirming that the use of a formal planning language significantly helps in the design of such complex scenarios.