Facilitating multi-AUV collaboration for marine archaeology

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have been widely used in assisting scientific operations. They can increase the scientific output by performing operations in a cost effective and safe manner. This paper focuses in the underwater archaeology scientific discipline. It presents the distributed high level architecture developed by the Heriot Watt University Ocean Systems Laboratory (HWUOSL) in the scope of the ARROWS project. This architecture utilises a distributed world model operating over an acoustic communications channel for achieving the coordination of a heterogeneous team of robots. Simulation results are presented showing the efficiency of the distributed world model architecture and the coordination performance.