Title
A Flexible Navigation Support System for a Team of Underwater Robots
Abstract
The primary and somewhat interrelated challenges affecting deployment of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are navigation and communication. We have developed miniature, agile, easy to carry and deploy AUVs equipped with a suite of sensors for underwater environmental sensing. In this paper, we propose a support system for multiple AUVs where a group of Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) coordinate to provide external positioning reference. They transmit an acoustic ranging pulse and then broadcast their position using acoustic communication. Communication errors are detected by using a novel approach where data decoding is coupled with navigation. Our system achieves scalability in the number of AUVs by using one-way travel time for ranging and making the AUVs passive receivers. Further, it allows the ASVs to be repositioned during a mission, so that they can provide positioning aid from a closer range. This is an advantage especially in shallow water environments, where range measurement errors increase significantly with increasing distance. We describe our system in detail and evaluate it with simulations based on real data as well as field experiments.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/MRS.2019.8901064
2019 International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems (MRS)
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
flexible navigation support system,underwater robots,autonomous underwater vehicles,underwater environmental sensing,multiple AUVs,ASVs,external positioning reference,acoustic ranging pulse,acoustic communication,data decoding,positioning aid,autonomous surface vehicles
Conference
978-1-7281-2877-1
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
5
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Anwar Quraishi101.01
Alexander Bahr21027.48
Felix Schill351.25
Alcherio Martinoli41466154.27