Cooperative Motion Planning for Multiple Autonomous Marine Vehicles

There is widespread interest in the deployment of fleets of marine robots with the potential to roam the oceans freely and collect data at an unprecedented scale. This calls for the development of efficient algorithms for multiple vehicle motion planning that can take directly into account the capabilities of each vehicle and environmental conditions and lend themselves to seamless integration with control and navigation systems. The paper describes advances towards the development of a new breed of motion planning systems that address explicitly inter-vehicle collision avoidance, together with a number of criteria that may include simultaneous times of arrival at assigned target points, energy minimization, and acoustic communication constraints. The theoretical framework adopted is rooted in the so-called Projection Operator Approach that borrows from optimization and dynamical systems theory. Simulations with full dynamic vehicle models illustrate the potential of the methods developed.