Exploring the Blue Frontier with Cooperative Marine Robots: Theory and Practice

摘要

Summary form only given, as follows. The complete presentation was not made available for publication as part of the conference proceedings. This talk addresses the general topic of cooperative motion planning, navigation, and control of marine vehicles, both from a theoretical and a practical perspective. The presentation builds upon practical developments and experiments. Examples of scientific missions with ASCs and AUVs, acting alone or in cooperation, set the stage for the main contents of the presentation. Especial emphasis is placed on the problem of operating groups of vehicles for scientific ocean studies, habitat mapping in complex 3D scenarios, geotechnical surveying, and sustained presence at sea in hazardous environments. From a theoretical standpoint, a number of challenging problems are addressed in the general area of networked systems subjected to stringent communication constraints. Namely, i) cooperative motion control using eventdriven control and communications and ii) range-based multiple target localization and tracking using tools from the areas of optimal motion planning and estimation theory. Some of the results obtained are illustrated with videos from actual field tests with multiple marine robots exchanging information over acoustic and optical networks. The core material presented in this talk was obtained in the scope of the following EU-funded projects: MORPH (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/101726/factsheet/en) CADDY (http://www.caddy-fp7.eu/), WiMUST (http://www.wimust.eu/), and H2020 EU Marine Robotics Research Infrastructure Network (https://www.eumarinerobots.eu/).