Robot Boats as a Mobile Aquatic Sensor Network

Abstract

This paper describes the Multilevel Autonomy Robot Telesupervision Architecture (MARTA), an architecture for supervisory control of a heterogeneous fleet of networked unmanned autonomous aquatic surface vessels carrying a payload of environmental science sensors. This architecture allows a land-based human scientist to effectively supervise data gathering by multiple robotic assets that implement a web of widely dispersed mobile sensors for in situ study of physical, chemical or biological processes in water or in the water/atmosphere interface. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.2.9 [Robotics]: autonomous vehicles, sensors; I.2.11 [Distributed Artificial Intelligence]: intelligent agents, multiagent systems