Autonomous Decentralized Mission Planning for Clusters of UUV

This paper considers a method for improved operational robustness in applications where clusters of uninhabitated underwater vehicles (UUVs) are deployed for the purpose of achieving a shared common mission. These applications are typically characterized by their strict requirement for coordination between the individual UUVs. The proposed method is based on the assumption that the shared mission objectives and the associate constraints can be stated in terms of a mixed-integer quadratic optimization problem and known by all UUVs. Thus on the outset, the method considered in this paper is similar to a centralized approach but solved in a parallel using a distributed Nash-based game approach. Sufficient conditions for numerical convergence of the method together with performance results are also presented. Finally, simulation results are presented to demonstrate the main features of the proposed method