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Cooperation Between Underwater Vehicles

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Marine Robot Autonomy

Abstract

The underwater environment intensifies difficulties inherent in cooperation between autonomous vehicles by dramatically reducing their ability to communicate with each other. Lack of communication drives the need for decentralized control which in turn requires a shared view of the tasks and their status as the mission progresses. Decision-making, especially task allocation, requires low-bandwidth mechanisms for negotiation and achieving consensus. Strategies to obtain this low-bandwidth decision-making and control rely on both the availability of significant a priori information about the mission and tasks and careful design of the system.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Assumes a ground vehicle with a turn radius of 30 m and sensor range of 60 m traveling at 8.94 m/s (20 mph) and an aerial vehicle with a turn radius of 50 m and sensor range of 400 m traveling at 13.41 m/s (30 mph), which both require that a decision be made at around 3.5 s from impact, and an underwater vehicle with a turn radius of 15 m and sensor range of 60 m traveling at 2.06 m/s (4 kts), which requires that a decision be made at 7.3 s from impact.

  2. 2.

    Total planning time for all three platform types is less than 30 s.

  3. 3.

    Stigmergic. Communication via alteration in the environment, as ant pheromone trails provide information about ant behavior to other ants.

  4. 4.

    MOOS, the “Mission Oriented Operating Suite,” is a software architecture for autonomous mobile robots, used on ground, surface, and underwater systems. More detail is available at the Oxford Mobile Robotics Group: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~mobile/MOOS/wiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Introduction.

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  1. Office of Naval Research Global, London, UK

    Signe Redfield

  2. Naval Surface Warfare Center, Panama City Division, FL, USA

    Signe Redfield

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  1. , Department of Mechanical Engineering, Dalhousie University, 1360 Barrington St., Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Mae L. Seto

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Redfield, S. (2013). Cooperation Between Underwater Vehicles. In: Seto, M. (eds) Marine Robot Autonomy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5659-9_6

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