Cooperative Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Used to Search Large Ocean Areas for Mines

Abstract

The overall objective of the research was to develop and apply strategies for autonomous collaboration among UUVs to search for underwater mines. We successfully simulated six behavior modules including Navigation and Formation Control, Vehicle Replacement, Divert to MLO for Inspection, Leader Replacement, Deployment and Recovery, and Multi-Vehicle Sensing. All these modules were implemented and simulated on the MOOS platform except for Multi-Vehicle Sensing. We also defined and developed a mapping strategy for UUVs. The Ul strategy creates a multi-layered map of the search space that contains information about fleet UUV positions, area coverage, low-resolution MLO position estimates, dangerous areas, and high-resolution MLO position estimates. We developed a fuzzy logic Supervisor/Planner module that operates in both a centralized and decentralized fashion to satisfy a variety of constraints and optimize time and energy resources for a fleet of UUVs. With these results we have satisfied all the requirements of our Baseline funding. In addition, we modified our communication protocol to a token-passing architecture in order to implement the UC2I reference mission using our modules with the Backseat/Front seat paradigm. We also located and bench tested a small Linux board in order to implement MOOS with a "backseat driver" paradigm on our UUVs.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 27, 2009
Accession Number
ADA507940

Entities

People

  • Dean B. Edwards

Organizations

  • University of Idaho

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acoustic Communications
  • Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
  • Autonomous Vehicles
  • Control Systems
  • Deployment
  • Fuzzy Logic
  • High Resolution
  • Inspection
  • Logic
  • Low Resolution
  • Navigation
  • Recovery
  • Underwater Mines
  • Underwater Vehicles
  • Unmanned Underwater Vehicles
  • Unmanned Vehicles
  • Vehicles

Readers

  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) Technology.
  • Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Autonomous Capabilities and Mission Reconnaissance.

Technology Areas

  • Space
  • Space - Spacecraft Maneuvers