Cooperative Marine Robotics: Theory and Practice
The last decade has witnessed tremendous progress in the development of marine technologies that are steadily affording scientists advanced equipment and methods for ocean exploration and
exploitation. Recent advances in marine robotics, sensors, computers, communications, and information systems are being applied to the development of sophisticated technologies that will
lead to safer, faster, and far more efficient ways of exploring the ocean frontier, especially in hazardous conditions. As part of this trend, there has been a surge of interest worldwide in the
development of autonomous marine robots capable of roaming the oceans freely and collecting data at the surface of the ocean and underwater on an unprecedented scale. Representative
examples are autonomous surface craft (ASC) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The mission scenarios envisioned call for the control of single or multiple AUVs acting in cooperation to execute challenging tasks without close supervision of human operators.
This talk addresses the general topic of cooperative 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 and commercial missions with ASCs and AUVs, acting alone or in cooperation, set the stage for the main contents of the presentation.
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 event-driven 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 networks.
The core material presented in the talk was obtained in the scope of the following EU-funded projects:
MORPH (http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/101726_en.html)
CADDY (http://www.caddy-fp7.eu/),
WiMUST (http://www.wimust.eu/)
H2020 EU Marine Robotics Research Infrastructure Network