A Centralized Autonomous System of Cooperation for UAVs- Monitoring and USVs- Cleaning

Abstract

This article proposes an approach which deals with the problem of monitoring ocean pollution and cleaning dirty zones using autonomous unmanned vehicles. The authors present a cooperative agent-based planning approach for heterogeneous unmanned vehicles with different roles. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) monitor multiple ocean regions and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) tackle the cleaning of dirty zones. Due to the rapid deployment of these unmanned vehicles, and the increase of ocean pollution, it is convenient to use a fleet of unmanned vehicles. Thus, most of the existing studies deal with the monitoring of different zones, the detection of the polluted zones and then the cleaning of the zones. In order to optimize this process, the authors' solution aims to use one UAV and one USV to reduce the pollution level of the ocean zones while taking into account the problem of fault tolerance related to these vehicles.