Experiments in the control and application of Automated Surface Vessel fleets

Over the past two decades, the use of Automated Surface Vessels (ASVs) has evolved from serving as military drones to performing a rich set of applications ranging from exploration to minesweeping to supporting the operation of underwater assets. The benefits of these systems motivate the question of how fleets of such ASVs could synergistically work together to perform more sophisticated and challenging tasks. In this paper, we describe our recent work in exploring the use of multi-ASV systems that sail in controlled formations in order to perform specific niche applications. We first describe our cluster space control technique, a formation control approach that promotes simple specification and monitoring of multi-robot systems. We then describe the design of our simple robotic kayaks which serve as our testbed for multi-ASV applications. Next, we show how we have applied the cluster space control to the multi-kayak fleet in order to test application concepts such as escorting/patrolling and gradient-based adaptive environmental sampling. Finally, we briefly describe some of our ongoing extensions to this work.