Distributed Collaborative Planning and Control for Undersea Surveillance using Swarms of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

We propose to develop and analyze ad hoc wireless networks that employ a mobile backbone network (MBN) based architecture for undersea surveillance systems that are configured by the use of underwater unmanned vehicles (UUVs). We will introduce new techniques for the effective use of UUVs in these architectures to make the ad hoc wireless network dynamically self-configurable, in supporting multimedia flows under quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees, and offering high levels of robustness. Our network configuration and QoS-routing operations rapidly adapt to detected threat scenarios by dynamically locating UUVs and routing message flows spatially and temporally in accordance with the specified measures of mission effectiveness. We will develop backbone synthesis, UUV positioning and Q0S-routing algorithms that effectively utilize the highly limited communications capacity assets, the limited energy resources, the underlying link induced high propagation delays and the dispersive nature of the undersea communications channels, in a scalable fashion. We will develop an extended IRI MBNP_Sense faster-than-real-time prototype simulator to evaluate and control the UUV based network, and navigate UUVs to optimal positions to best attain system performance. The efficiency and scalability of our techniques will be proven for large networks under a multitude of surveillance scenarios, network structures and mission objectives.