A Survey of Underwater Multi-Robot Systems

TLDR

Underwater multi‑robot systems (UMRS) sit at the intersection of ocean development and multi‑robot systems, attracting growing research interest over recent decades. This survey reviews cooperation issues in UMRS, focusing on how new functions emerge. The authors categorize cooperation by task, motion, and measurement spaces and analyze UMRS architecture across robot performance, new functions, and MRS technical approaches. The survey identifies promising future research directions and offers insights into effectively deploying UMRS for diverse underwater tasks in complex ocean scenarios.

Abstract

As a cross-cutting field between ocean development and multi-robot system (MRS), the underwater multi-robot system (UMRS) has gained increasing attention from researchers and engineers in recent decades. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of cooperation issues, one of the key components of UMRS, from the perspective of the emergence of new functions. More specifically, we categorize the cooperation in terms of task-space, motion-space, measurement-space, as well as their combination. Further, we analyze the architecture of UMRS from three aspects, i.e., the performance of the individual underwater robot, the new functions of underwater robots, and the technical approaches of MRS. To conclude, we have discussed related promising directions for future research. This survey provides valuable insight into the reasonable utilization of UMRS to attain diverse underwater tasks in complex ocean application scenarios.