For underwater robotics there exists severe constraints regarding wireless bandwidth in the kilobits range. This makes a centralised approach to high-level mission management possibly less than ideal due to inherent delays and possible temporary incompleteness in data during decision making. This thesis aims to propose, implement (in ROS) and test a distributed approach. An auction based method for task assignment was being used, as well as a Pagerank based approach that models a trust based hierarchy between autonomous agents inferred from information exchange, in order to enforce decision conformity. Simulations where carried out using UWsim and a custom made bandwidth limiter for ROS. It was concluded that the Pagerank based algorithm managed to uphold conformity and solve conflicts during network slowdown but did not always lead to the correct decisions being enforced.

Searching for lost people in a Wilderness Search and Rescue (WiSAR) scenario is a task that can benefit from large numbers of agents, some of whom may be robotic. These agents may have differing levels of autonomy, determined by the set of tasks they are performing. In addition, the level of autonomy that results in the best performance may change due to varying workload or other factors. Allowing a supervisor and a searcher to jointly decide the correct level of autonomy for a given situation (“mixed initiative”) results in better overall performance than giving an agent absolute control over their level of autonomy (“adaptive autonomy”) or giving a supervisor absolute control over the agent's level of autonomy (“adjustable autonomy”).

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