Fault Tolerant Area Coverage Using Underwater Vehicles

Multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) can be deployed to map large regions. For mapping, the desired motion plan must be lawn mover pattern to scan the bottom. In addition to motion plan constraints, AUVs are subject to limited sensing and communication ranges and some of the AUVs can fail while performing the assigned mission leg. Developing an efficient fault tolerant area coverage controller with these constraints is a difficult task. In this paper, we develop a consensus based fault tolerant area coverage controller that takes the uncertainty in environments, communication range constraints and AUV failures while covering the area with limited repeated coverage. Current approach is able to deal with agent faults located in the middle of a series of AUVs. Simulations are presented to validate the approach.