Decision system for a team of autonomous underwater vehicles—Preliminary report

The paper presents preliminary research whose main goal is to build a ship protection system. One of the elements of the system will be a sub-system responsible for capturing and destroying/neutralizing all dangerous objects occurring inside a guarded area. This task will be performed by a team of autonomous underwater vehicles. To construct a decision system for the vehicles, i.e. the system whose task is to provide high-level decisions regarding direction and velocity of move, many different methods can be applied. Examples are evolutionary neural networks and expert systems with fuzzy decision rules. To test usefulness of the above methods in a role of the decision system, experiments in a predator–prey problem were carried out. In the experiments, the task of vehicles-predators was to capture a vehicle-prey behaving by a simple deterministic strategy. The current paper is a report on all the experiments mentioned.