Autonomous Optimal Rendezvous of Underwater Vehicles

Abstract

The capability of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to rendezvous with other AUVs was implemented and demonstrated in the Naval Postgraduate School ARIES AUV; providing a method of overcoming the severe range limitations of high-bandwidth underwater data transfer methods in order to enable accelerated access to data collected by a network of data-gathering survey AUVs. Rendezvous was implemented by autonomous reconfiguration of ARIES' operations, using a mission planning module to combine acoustically-transmitted rendezvous requests from survey AUVs with pre-stored survey AUV mission data to generate rendezvous missions based either on time-optimal or energy-optimal trajectories. The planning module efficiently generates rendezvous trajectories based on solutions derived using optimal control theory. A new third layer of control, based on a finite state machine, was added above ARIES' autopilot and mission execution functions in order to initiate mission planning and replanning, activate missions, sequence vehicle operations through seven defined states, control acoustic communications, and handle perturbations and missed rendezvous.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 2004
Accession Number
ADA427262

Entities

People

  • John W. Nicholson

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
  • Communication Channels
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Control Surfaces
  • Control Systems
  • Geometry
  • Guidance
  • Measurement
  • Proportional Navigation
  • Rendezvous
  • Rendezvous Trajectories
  • Space Rendezvous
  • Spacecraft
  • Underwater Vehicles
  • Unmanned Underwater Vehicles

Readers

  • Robotics and Automation.