Behavior-based Control: An Approach to Cooperative AUVs Missions

Cooperation of multiple underwater vehicles can offer great improvements to a variety of applications, opening the possibility to perform more complex tasks (e.g., target recognition, environmental monitoring). This paper addresses control algorithm issues for multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) employed in a target detection mission. A novel Behavior-Based (BB) algorithm, which evaluates each single AUV motion as a reaction to the perceived surrounding, while taking into account the mission history, is proposed. Defining each robot behavioral action, the algorithm leads to an emergent behavior of the whole fleet, which can even be improved with data sharing. To test the proposed algorithm a real vehicle model together with its motion controller have been implemented. Results demonstrate that a realistic AUV can follow the reference path produced by the high-level controller with a negligible motion error.