Conceptual Communication for Multi-vehicle Systems ∗

For multiple vehicles to exchange information with and request aid from their collaborators, they must be able to communicate. This communication must go beyond transmitting bit strings. It must allow vehicles to interpret these bit strings as meaningful messages. In this paper, we argue for the need to provide abstract meaning to the messages based on the vehicle’s conceptual representation of the world. We call this conceptual communication. We also present a Conceptual Language for AUVs (cola) that we have developed to support communication between cooperating autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Elise H. Turner and Steven G. Chappell, 1995. Conceptual Communication for Multi-vehicle Systems. Technical Report No. 95–08, Computer Science Department, University of New Hampshire. ∗This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IRI-9309703. Steven Chappell’s efforts in this work were funded under ARPA contract number MDA972-90-K-0003 and NSF under contract number BES-9222146. We would like to thank the members of the UNH CDPS group for many helpful discussions about this research. In particular, we would like to thank Laura Donia and Scott Valcourt for their help with implementation of cola; Mike Seymour, Cathy Steffen, Roy Turner and Martin Dempsey for their insights; and Roy Turner for the implementation of Orca. We would also like to thank Dick Blidberg for the initial idea of basing an AUV language on natural languages and for helpful further discussions.