An Approach for Planning a Safe Mission Begin and End for Teams of Marine Robots

This paper describes an approach for Mission Planning for heterogeneous marine robot teams, with a special emphasis on the ability of the robots to start and end a mission in a quick, but safe manner (safe in terms of collision avoidance). This work was inspired by practical experiences during sea trials, in which the process between the termination of a mission (due to success or failure) and the starting of the next mission after manually sorting the vehicles into an initial formation consumed a lot of valuable time. In general, a mission planning concept is of great importance for robotic teams performing complex missions at high levels of autonomy. The planning concept must be flexible enough to allow for an adaptation of a preplanned mission file to the circumstances just before the mission starts, like vehicle states or whether conditions. In this paper, we will present our concept of robust mission planning for a specific class of missions for marine robots, and how it is embedded into an open source Geographical Information System (GIS). Also, we will present the concept for safe mission begin and end to meet the described requirements and how the concept was realized within our planning software.