Cooperative Autonomous Marine Vehicle motion control in the scope of the EU GREX Project: Theory and Practice

This paper describes the core of the research work done by the ISR/IST team on cooperative autonomous marine vehicle (AMV) motion control in the scope of the EU Project GREX - coordination and control of cooperating heterogeneous unmanned systems in uncertain environments. The first part of the paper affords the reader a concise introduction to the general problem of cooperative motion control of fleets of AMVs by highlighting illustrative mission scenarios developed collectively by the GREX partners and summarizing the main challenges that they pose to system engineers. This is followed by the description of a general architecture for cooperative autonomous marine vehicle control in the presence of time-varying communication topologies and communication losses that is rooted in a solid control-theoretic framework. The results of simulations with the NetMar_SyS - networked marine systems simulator - of ISR/IST are presented and show the efficacy of the algorithms developed for cooperative motion control. The last part of the paper focuses on practical issues and describes the results of tests at sea in the Azores, in the Summer of 2008. The paper concludes with a critical review of the work done and a discussion of theoretical and practical implementation issues that warrant further research and development effort.