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

Toyon Research Corporation, together with the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Nautronix MariPro Corporation, proposes to develop autonomy algorithms which will transform a set of independent underwater vehicles (AUVs) into a collaborating swarm of AUVs that work together to respond to underwater threats. The paper describes the autonomy, as demonstrated as part of the Toyon CAATS seedling demonstration, from which swarm behavior emerges as each node contributes and forwards information deemed pertinent to other nodes. We describe the hierarchical autonomy structure and the overall guiding principles for achieving mission success in the dynamic noisy, shallow water environment. We describe the localization algorithm appropriate for swarming agents amid the multi-path acoustic propagation inherent to littoral regions. We present the fusion and tracking algorithms best suited for the sensor measurements (bearings-only, time-of-closest-approach) and noisy environment. We also describe the simulation tool used to develop the autonomy algorithms. Finally, we present preliminary simulation results showing the projected performance of a swarm endowed with the algorithms described herein. Toyon, UCSB, and Nautronix MariPro are ideally suited for this research and development effort and have extensive experience in sensor systems, networking, tracking, localization, and underwater acoustic communications and detection systems.