Experimental results of coordinated sampling/patrolling by autonomous underwater vehicles

Coverage of a given area by means of coordinated autonomous robots is a mission required in several applications such as, for example, patrolling, monitoring or environmental sampling. From a mathematical perspective, this can often be modeled as the need to estimate a scalar field, eventually time varying as in the security applications. In this paper, the problem is addressed for the challenging underwater scenario, where localization and communication pose additional constraints. The solution exploits the appealing properties of the Voronoi partition of a convex set within a probabilistic framework. In addition, the algorithm is totally distributed and characterized by a strong engineering perspective allowing the handling of asynchronous communication or possible loss or adjunct of vehicles. Beyond the test in dozen of numerical case studies, the algorithm has been validated by a challenging underwater test in 3 dimension involving two Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). The experiments were run in the La Spezia harbor, in Italy, in February 2012 as demo of the European project Co³AUVs.