Naval Mine Countermeasure Missions

Abstract

Undersea operations using autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) provide a different and in some ways a more challenging problem than tasks for unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned ground vehicles. In particular, in undersea operations, communication windows are restricted, and bandwidth is limited. Consequently, coordination among agents is correspondingly more difficult. In traditional approaches, a central planner initially assigns subtasks to a set of AUVs to achieve the team goal. However, those initial task assignments may become inefficient during real-time execution because of the real-world issues such as failures. Therefore, initial task allocations are usually subject to change if efficiency is a high concern. Reallocations are needed and should be performed in a distributed manner. To provide such flexibility, we propose a distributed auction-based cooperation framework, distributed and efficient multirobot-cooperation framework (DEMiR-CF), which is an online dynamic task allocation (reallocation) system that aims to achieve a team goal while using resources effectively. DEMiR-CF, with integrated task scheduling and execution capabilities, can also respond to and recover from real-time contingencies such as communication failures, delays, range limitations, and robot failures.