UAV-USV Cooperative Task Allocation for Smart Ocean Networks

The recent emerging technologies (e.g., manufactures, communications) have accelerated the applications of unmanned vehicles including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), which provides a promising paradigm to intelligently perform sophisticated tasks (e.g., monitoring and protecting marine environment) in smart ocean. In this paper, we present a novel UAV-USV cooperative task allocation scheme to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of information gathering and monitoring in smart ocean networks. Specifically, we first establish a UAV-USV cooperative task allocation framework, in which UAVs are deployed in the air to monitor the ocean environment (e.g., oil spills, disasters, etc.) and USVs cruise on the ocean to perform tasks (e.g., rescuing). Then, we employ the matching-coalition game model to enable the cooperation between UAVs and USVs for jointly maximizing their utilities. Afterwards, a stable matching-coalition game is proposed to obtain the optimal strategies of both UAVs and USVs as the Nash equilibrium solution to the formulated game. We finally conduct simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, and the results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the efficiency of task allocation in smart ocean networks.