Abstract-Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are a useful tool for science and industry. They significantly reduce the risk to humans in operations in hazardous and high cost situations. The use of multiple AUVs can enhance the operational capabilities by introducing specialisation of AUV capabilities and parallelising task execution. The coordination of the multi-AUV team requires communication among its members. Underwater communications are low bandwidth, high latency and error prone. This paper studies different task allocation strategies for an underwater archaeological inspection scenario under communication constraints. Three different distributed methods are implemented and compared in simulation. The first is a greedy allocation method used as a baseline for comparison. The second is a k-Means based formulation aiming to balance the load among the robots. The third is the linear programming formulation of the multiple travelling salesmen problem. Results are analysed in the scope of mission completion time and the distance travelled by the robots. Results indicate that the k-Means method performs better when communication error rates are lower, while the mTSP method performs better when communication error rates are higher.
This paper presents some of the challenges related to multi-robot cooperation for the marine environment. Special attention is given to the world representation topic and to the communication challenges. Ontologies represent the tool to store and dynamically update world information. Due to the conditions of the underwater domain, communication among robots presents several issues. The exchange of information between the local world model of each robot, and those of the other robots needs to properly address specific points, such as limited bandwidth, reliability of the acoustic channel, selection of the information to be shared with other vehicles and information merging with previous knowledge of the world. Three scenarios will be then analysed: the Pandora project, with an emphasis on persistent autonomy, world modeling and failure management through appropriate ontologies; the Trident project, which deals with joint missions with an Autonomous Surface Vessel (ASV) cooperating with an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), and the Arrows project, which envisages the use of a fleet of AUVs for underwater archaeology operations.
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