A Cooperative Fault-Tolerant Mission Planner System for Unmanned Surface Vehicles in Ocean Sensor Network Monitoring and Inspection

Abstract

This article presents a cooperative fault-tolerant mission planner system for a team of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) employed for monitoring and inspection of ocean sensor networks. The problem of monitoring and inspection of ocean sensor networks is summarized as verifying the healthiness of the buoy sensors via USVs in a pre-determined zone and within a pre-defined mission time. A realistic map of the SOFAR's global Spotter network, including Spotter buoys used for observation, forecast, and hindcast of ocean and weather data is used. The mission planner system is then developed to provide a cooperative inspection of the Spotter buoys to the maximum possible numbers in an assigned mission time while the uncertainty with failure of USVs due to internal /external faults is incorporated. Extensive simulation studies together with statistical analysis are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed cooperative fault-tolerant mission planner system. The simulation results confirm the fidelity, effectiveness, and robustness of the proposed system to be implemented onboard USVs’ host computers for different monitoring and inspection missions.