Strategies for simultaneous multiple autonomous underwater vehicle operation and control

Abstract

Under sampling of the coastal oceans remains a persistent problem for standard oceano-graphic measurement practice wherein an instrument package is tethered to a research vessel. The overhead costs associated with operating a large research vessel impose a strict minimum on the cost of data collected. Owing to the overheads, significant improvements in sampling technology on the tethered platform can only produce modest gains in the cost effectiveness. In contrast, untethered vehicles if operated simultaneously have the potential to increase cost effectiveness significantly by distributing the overhead costs over several sampling platforms. Furthermore, synoptic and pseudosynoptic data can be collected with multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), thereby providing the type of information critical to dynamic process modeling unattainable with non-synoptic data. While the goal of simultaneous multiple-vehicle operation has been espoused over the last few years, AUV technology and practice have until recently been too immature to realize that potential. Recently, Florida Atlantic University (FAU) has developed a new series of modular AUVs with the express purpose of supporting multiple sensors and multiple-vehicle operation. This series of vehicle is called the Ocean Explorer of which three have been produced so far. This paper will explore some of the associated navigation, tracking, control and deployment problems associated with multiple-vehicle operation in coastal applications. In addition, the characteristics of the component level intelligent distributed control system, integrated data logger and vehicle control system will be discussed. In particular this paper will discuss how FAU has applied the concepts of elastic constraint propagation and the symmetric fuzzy decision-making model to AUV control systems. Some results of early experiments in synoptic data collection with a conductivity, temperature and depth (CTD) sensor using multiple AUVs for the determination of horizontal structure will be described.