Managing the areas of responsibility for collaborative undersea searchers

In recent years the role of unmanned searchers in undersea search operations has been a topic of considerable interest. In particular, the use of multiple UUVs in the search for stationary or slow moving targets has raised a number of new research questions, one of which is how to effectively plan search operations. In this paper we develop a planning approach to improve trade-offs between search coverage and false search rates for a group of unmanned searchers operating in a bounded region of interest. This important trade-off is typically handled by setting an overall constraint on searcher false alarm rate and partitioning the search region among the individual search assets. We show that this non-collaborative coverage approach can be improved upon by allowing overlap in the areas of responsibility of the searchers, driven by increased sweep widths and independent confirmation requirements on target detection. Standard computational models for acoustic detection performance for the individual searchers are utilized as a function of detection threshold to control the trade-off between searcher sweep rate and searcher false alarm rate. Parametric explorations of the resulting system performance model are used to illustrate the design dependencies in numerical examples.