Autonomous and Decentralised Mission Planning for Clusters of UUVs

BALDERUD J,GIOVANINI L, KATEBI M

Lisboa, Portugal

Conferencia; 7th Conference on Manoeuvring and Control of Marine Craft; 2006

Instituto Superior Técnico

Abstract: This paper considers a method for improved operational robustness in applications where clusters of Unhabitated Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) are deployed for the purpose of achieving a shared common mission. These applications are typically characterized by their strict requirement for coordination between the individual UUVs.The proposed method is based on the assumption that the shared  mission objectives and the associate constraints can be stated in terms of a mixed-integer quadratic optimization problem and known by all UUVs. Thus on the outset, the method considered in this paper is similar to a centralized approach but solved in a decentralized manner: the problem is decomposed into smaller sub-problems and solved in a parallel using a distributed Nash-based game approach. Sufficient conditions for numerical convergence of the method together with  performance results are also presented. Finally, simulation results arepresented to demonstrate the main features of the proposed method.