Towards Programmable Coordination of Unmanned Vehicle Networks★

The use of unmanned vehicle networks for diverse applications is becoming widespread. It is generally hard to program unmanned vehicle networks as a “whole”, however. The coordination of multiple vehicles requires careful planning through intricate human intervention, and a high degree of informality is implied in what concerns the specification of a “network program” for an application scenario. In this context, we have been developing a programming language for expressing global specifications of coordinated behavior in unmanned vehicle networks, the Networked Vehicles' Language (NVL). In this paper we illustrate the use of the language for a thermal pollution plume tracking scenario employing unmanned underwater vehicles.