Underwater Robots - Gianluca Antonelli.pdf

9. Coordinated Control of Platoons ofAUVs
9.1 Introduction
The use of several AUVs to achieve fulfillment ofatask might beofbenefit
in several situations: explorations of areas, de-mining [74], as in un the first
Gulf’s war, or interaction with the environment inwhich the team of AUVs
may, e.g., push an object that one single AUV would not have the power
to move. InFigure 1.6, apossible scenario of mine countermeasure using a
platoon of AUVs under study atthe SACLANT Undersea Research Center
of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is given.
Considering surface marine vehicles, in [155] proposes aleader-follower
formation control algorithm; experiments with one scale vehicle following a
simulated leader are provided. Reference [141] presents anaval minesweeper
platoon in which asupervisor vehicle is in charge of tasking in real-time
the remaining vehicles. Concerning multi-robot systems in general, one of
the first works is reported in[241], where asuccessful group behavior is
achieved by considering only local sensing for each robot. The paper [291] is
an interesting tutorial about control of multi-robot systems in awide sense;
it can be considered as astarting reading tounderstand the nomenclature
and the research subjects on the topic. Since an exhaustive literature survey
is huge it will be simply skipped in this context, focusing our attention on
algorithm developed for the underwater environment.
In particular, the platoons of AUVs experience some specific characteristics;
• The AUVs mathematical models are generally nonholonomic, in fact, in
case of exploration the use of torpedo-like vehicles is of common use;
• In case of AUVs equipped with control surfaces there isasubstantial impossibility
inhovering the vehicle due to the general absence of thrust at
low velocity;
• The communication bandwidth is limited thus inhibiting alarge exchange
of data among the vehicles;
• Localization of the AUVs is not easy due tothe absence of asingle proprioceptive
sensor that gives this information.
Reference [120, 47] reports interesting experimental results on the use of
an underwater glider fleet for adaptive ocean sampling. The sampling, thus,
G. Antonelli: Underwater Robots, 2nd Edition, STAR 2, pp. 225–236, 2006.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006