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Abstract. Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed for missions that are deemed dangerous or impractical to perform by humans in many military and disaster scenarios. UAVs in a team need to operate in sub-groups or independently to perform specific tasks, but still synchronise state information regularly and cope with intermittent communication failures as well as permanent UAV failures. This paper describes a failure management scheme that copes with failures, which may result in disjoint sub-networks within the team. A communication management protocol is proposed to control UAVs performing disconnected individual operations, while maintaining the team's structure by trying to ensure that all members of the mission rendezvous to communicate at intermittent intervals. The evaluation of the proposed approaches shows that the schemes are scalable and perform significantly better than similar centralised approaches.

Abstract-Many missions are deemed dangerous or impractical to perform by humans, but can use collaborating, self-managing Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs) which adapt their behaviour to current context, recover from component failure or optimise performance. This paper describes a policy-based distributed self-management framework for both individual and teams of UAVs. We use three levels of specifications -policy, mission class and mission instance to enable reuse of both policies and mission classes. The architecture has been tested on devices ranging from small laptops to body area networks. Initial evaluation shows the distributed architecture is scalable and outperforms a centralised mission management scheme.

Abstract-Home networks are becoming increasingly complex but existing management solutions are not simple to use since they are not tailored to the needs of typical home-users. In this paper we present a new approach to home network management that allows users to formulate quite sophisticated "comic-strip" policies using an attractive iPad application. The policies are based on the management wishes of home users elicited in a user study. Comic-strip policies are passed to a Policy engine running on a new Home Network Router designed to facilitate a variety of management tasks. We illustrate our approach via a number end-to-end experiments in an actual home deployment, using our prototype implementation.

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