Cooperative distributed algorithm for AUV teams: A minimum entropy approach

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have found their application in exploration and surveillance. This paper proposes a cooperative distributed search algorithm based on a minimum entropy approach for AUVs with capabilities like multi agent exploration. The work is motivated by the project “Thesaurus”, whose among its own purposes has the survey of marine areas of archaeological interest in the Tuscan Archipelago. The cooperative algorithm is developed to move each vehicle on the exploration area taking into account communication constraints and a prior prediction probability map, which is updated on line during the mission. The prior probability map over the exploration area is built through Gaussian kernel approximation, on the basis of previous findings and historical archival data.