Abstract
Formation control and cooperative motion planning are two major research areas currently being used in multi robot motion planning and coordination. The current study proposes a hybrid framework for guidance and navigation of swarm of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) by combining the key characteristics of formation control and cooperative motion planning. In this framework, two layers of offline planning and online planning are integrated and applied on a practical marine environment. In offline planning, an optimal path is generated from a constrained A* path planning approach, which is later smoothed using a spline. This optimal trajectory is fed as an input for the online planning where virtual target (VT) based multi-agent guidance framework is used to navigate the swarm of USVs. This VT approach combined with a potential theory based swarm aggregation technique provides a robust methodology of global and local collision avoidance based on known positions of the USVs. The combined approach is evaluated with the different number of USVs to understand the effectiveness of the approach from the perspective of practicality, safety and robustness.
Highlights
Motivated by the increased presence of autonomous agents, research organisations and industrial firms are putting their effort in the development of unmanned vehicles, able to operate autonomously in the marine environment
It is most important to discuss details of different approaches associated with formation control and cooperative motion planning before delving into the details of the multi unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) framework adopted in the current study
In terms of a multi USV framework where the current thesis focuses on, fewer studies have taken place in the last decade with a focus on applications such as collaborative anti-submarine warfare, surveillance of territorial waters and underway ship replenishment ([13,14]). It is worth noting from the literature that compared to the research on developing approaches for fleet of UGVs, UAVs and AUVs very fewer studies have taken place in the area of USV formations and there is a strong need to explore the area of cooperative behaviour with a multi USV framework
Summary
Motivated by the increased presence of autonomous agents, research organisations and industrial firms are putting their effort in the development of unmanned vehicles, able to operate autonomously in the marine environment. Formation control and cooperative motion planning are two major areas being investigated in the literature towards the study of the multi vehicle systems. A list of key factors that needs to be considered for designing algorithms related to formation control and cooperative motion planning are already listed in the Figure 1 with formation control being the most widely investigated area It is most important to discuss details of different approaches associated with formation control and cooperative motion planning before delving into the details of the multi USV framework adopted in the current study. The feature of external collision avoidance with shoreline by modelling shoreline as a set of repulsive points using a repulsive potential function
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