Cooperative swarm behaviour for in situ underwater environmental measurements

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to perform comprehensive in situ environmental measurements in shallow waterbodies with the help of a swarm of small and flexible autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). To perform simultaneous measurements at different locations, the mission is automatically subdivided amongst the robots using a rule-based robot control architecture and special heuristics depending on internal robot states. This allows a significantly larger coverage of CTD measurements reducing costs on the one hand and minimizing the overall mission times on the other hand.