Developing Fleets of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

摘要

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have a demonstrated capability to collect valuable data for scientific and military purposes. Historically, individual vehicles have been used. To reduce the overall time and cost of acquiring data over large areas, multiple vehicles must be used. A fleet of 5 AUVs, capable of underwater commendation, were fabricated. Languages and logics were developed to enable collaborative operations among the vehicles. Experiments with a formation of 5 AUVs operating underwater simultaneously are described. The AUVs operated autonomously, in that they enabled their operations on their own, initiated and constrained by underwater acoustic communication and navigation against a general behavioral background provided by programmed logics. The operations were not choreographed in advance and programmed into the machines, nor were they the result of intervention by an operator on the surface. The vehicles performed deployment, formation-flying, vehicle replacement, divert-to-point of interest, and leader replacement behaviors. The experiments show that autonomous collaborative behavior by 5 AUVs is possible under the constraints of underwater acoustic navigation and acoustic communication.