Efficient Protocols for Integrated Communication and Formation Control in UUV Task Forces

摘要

We propose a new message-efficient communication protocol for maintaining ranging and positional formation in a dynamically moving UUV task force. The protocol offers several attractive features including implementation simplicity, low message overhead and robustness. The proposed protocol is not stand-alone, the formational aspects of the protocol are integrated with other aspects of inter-vessel communication, including data transfer and control. Medium access control, data communication and ranging are implemented via an efficient token-vector passing technique. The main feature of our protocol is the efficient encoding of pairwise UUV range information that can be computed simultaneously by all vessels. This enables each UUV to continuously (with each message) update its world-view of the entire formation. Using only reasonable assumptions about underwater acoustic communication, we show that a simple N- element range-vector is sufficient for each UUV to obtain and maintain complete state information about the current network topology (in terms of all other UUV positions and ranges between all UUV pairs) within 1 + 1/N token-vector trip times.