Achieving cooperation within a team of unmanned vehicles raises numerous difficulties. One of them concerns communication. Most cooperation architectures disregard this, but in real-world situations, the vehicles may not be able to communicate with each other at will. We consider teams of UCAVs (Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles) accomplishing a collaborative mission with limited (local) broadcast communication. The very dynamic nature of this domain leads us to consider mechanisms that allow the team to continuously adapt its organization to the communication possibilities between vehicles. When global cooperation is impossible, the vehicles must form subteams to execute collaborative tasks like coordinated attack or formation flight. Therefore we propose a Dynamic Coalition Formation (DCF) mechanism. By overhearing some of the messages emitted by its teammates, each agent can easily update its knowledge of the activity of the team and adapt its behavior accordingly. This DCF mechanism is designed to be at the heart of a complete cooperation architecture for teams of agents operating with limited communication possibilities in dynamic environments. Several theoretical and experimental results have already been obtained on this DCF mechanism. This architecture is implemented in a simulator for our application domain. In the current stage of development, the synthetic UCAVs possess basic flight capabilities (Nap Of Earth (NOE) flight, route following and basic formation flight), noisy sensors and a simple flight model. Simple surface to air defense has also been simulated, the focus being rather on creating a dynamic environment than a realistic one. This dynamic virtual environment will allow us to evaluate the performance of the architecture through the logging of various parameters and directly through a 3D vizualisation.
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