Experiments in the Control and Application of Automated Surface Vessel Fleets

CHRISTOPHER KITTS; PAUL MAHACEK; THOMAS ADAMEK; IGNACIO MAS

Hawaii

Congreso; Oceans MTS/IEEE Conference; 2011

Marine Technology Society / IEEE

Over the past two decades, the use of AutomatedSurface Vessels (ASVs) has evolved from serving as militarydrones to performing a rich set of applications ranging fromexploration to minesweeping to supporting the operation ofunderwater assets. The benefits of these systems motivate thequestion of how fleets of such ASVs could synergistically worktogether to perform more sophisticated and challenging tasks. Inthis paper, we describe our recent work in exploring the use ofmulti-ASV systems that sail in controlled formations in order toperform specific niche applications. We first describe our clusterspace control technique, a formation control approach thatpromotes simple specification and monitoring of multi-robotsystems. We then describe the design of our simple robotickayaks which serve as our testbed for multi-ASV applications.Next, we show how we have applied the cluster space control tothe multi-kayak fleet in order to test application concepts such asescorting/patrolling and gradient-based adaptive environmentalsampling. Finally, we briefly describe some of our ongoingextensions to this work.