Online Mission Planning for Cooperative Target Tracking of Marine Vehicles

In the cooperative target tracking maneuvering a group of vehicles is required to follow a target while maintaining a desired formation in space. For that effect, the trajectory of the target has to be estimated (for example by one of the vehicles in formation), translated into mission codes (to save communication resources) and transmitted to the other vehicles. This paper addresses the online mission planning task of converting the absolute or relative position data available from the positioning system installed on the target (e.g. INS, GPS) into a set of lines and constant curvature arcs. Two algorithms are proposed: one using a polynomial fitting and a more complex one using an Interactive Multiple-Model Kalman filter. Simulation results using experimental data and a set of simulated data corrupted with noise and data loss are presented and discussed.