Opportunistic Sharing of Airborne Sensors

Airborne sensors are often idle for much of their flight, e.g., while the platform carrying them is in transit to and from the locations of sensor tasks. The sensing needs of many other potential information consumers might thus be served by sharing such sensors, allowing other information consumers to opportunistically task them during their otherwise unscheduled time. Toward this end, we have developed Mission-Driven Tasking of Information Producers (MTIP), a prototype system for opportunistic sharing of airborne sensors. This paper describes its implementation as an agent-based task allocation system on top of the Marti Quality of Service (QoS)-managed publish-subscribe information management system, and presents simulations of a disaster response scenario demonstrating how MTIP can increase the number of sensor tasks served as well as reducing the number of UAVs required to serve a given set of sensor tasks.