Aerospace and Electronic Systems - March 2019 - 54

ARIES: An Autonomous Controller For Multirobot Cooperation

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Figure 14.

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Hybrid UGV-UAV system for real experiments.

other autonomous controllers, ARIES is a multiagent
architecture which brings the T-REX framework and
the hierarchical leader-follower approach together.
This scheme allows ARIES to provide a distributed execution and a centralized deliberation into the leader, as
well as scalability and flexibility to control multiple
robotic platforms. Also, the hierarchical scheme provides an affordable way to implement and deploy fail
recover mechanisms in ARIES to create fault-tolerant
instances of the architecture.
We have provided an empirical demonstration showing that ARIES is in a mature state for solving an exploration scenario extracted from the state of the art in
autonomous controllers. ARIES is able to control and
coordinate a hybrid UGV-UAV system in an exploration
mission in a Mars-like environment, which has been simulated through the V-REP simulator framework. Nevertheless, there is still work following this research line.
Currently, we are working on designing a robust and reliable failure management system for complex scenarios.
Also, we are working on evaluating ARIES in a real environment using the hybrid UGV-UAV system shown in
Figure 14, which relies on a modified TurtleBot II robot
and an autonomous UAV built by our research group.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT

plexity and expressivity," in Proc. 12th Nat. Conf. Artif.
Intell., vol. 94, 1994, pp. 1123-1128.

The work of F. Ropero is co-funded by the European
Social Fund and University of Alcala´ under the contract
number PEJD-2018-PRE/TIC-8176.
The work of Marı´a D. R-Moreno is funded by the Spanish
Ministry of Sciences, Innovation and University under the
grant number PRX18/00563.
All authors want to thank the useful comments from Dr.
Erik Steur and Dr. Javier Alonso from TU Delft.

[14] D. McDermott et al., "PDDL-the planning domain definition language," Tech. rep., Available at: www.cs.yale.edu/
homes/dvm, 1998.
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vol. 3, pp. 2992-2997.
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teams," in Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. Intell. Robots Syst.,

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54

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