Cooperative Search and Survey Using Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs)

In this work, we study algorithms for cooperative search and survey using a fleet of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). Due to the limited energy, communication range/bandwidth, and sensing range of the AUVs, underwater search and survey with multiple AUVs brings about several new challenges since a large amount of data needs to be collected by each AUV, and any AUV may fail unexpectedly. To address the challenges and meet our objectives of minimizing the total survey time and traveled distance of AUVs, we propose a cooperative rendezvous scheme called Synchronization-Based Survey (SBS) to facilitate cooperation among a large number of AUVs when surveying a large area. In SBS, AUVs form an intermittently connected network (ICN) in that they periodically meet each other for data aggregation, control signal dissemination, and AUV failure detection/recovery. Numerical analysis and simulations have been performed to compare the performance of three variants of SBS schemes, namely, Alternating Column Synchronization (ACS), Strict Line Synchronization (SLS), and X Synchronization (XS). The results show that XS can outperform other SBS schemes in terms of the survey time and the traveled distance of AUVs. We also compare XS with nonsynchronization-based survey and the lower bound on the survey time and traveled distance. The results show that XS achieves a close to optimal performance.