COORDINATED CONTROL OF HETEROGENOUS VEHICLES BASED ON INTELLIGENT SONOBUOYS WITH DGPS

摘要

This paper presents a novel method for coordinating a team of heterogenous vehicles including an Autonomous Surface Vessels (ASV) and several Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) based on a dedicated acoustic navigation scheme. With the help of a set of intelligent surface sonobuoys equipped with hydrophones and DGPS receivers, the position of an underwater vehicle of interest carrying an acoustic pinger could be estimated by measuring the times of arrival (TOA) of acoustic signals synchronized to DGPS time. Sonobuoys transmit the DGPS positions themselves and the TOA to the central control ASV via radio, where the high precise position of the underwater vehicles with respect to some inertial reference frame is computed. With such positions, the ASV generates and allocates the waypoints to the AUVs. Then the team with heterogenous vehicles could implement the coordinated search and rescue scenario as a whole. When compared with classical underwater navigation systems, higher precise positions of AUVs are conveniently achieved, and then higher precise waypoints of coordinated task could be achieved. The paper further shows the simultaneous LS positioning algorithm for the coordinated control scheme. The advantage of the novel method in this paper is easily handling with heterogeneity in underwater coordinated control task.