Cooperation of coordinated teams of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Abstract

This paper presents the initial stage of the development of an underwater localization system suitable for a flexible number of users. Multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) can work as a team and cooperate with other teams of AUVs without costly and acoustically active components, which saves energy and allows AUVs to remain silent. The main building blocks for such a system are: spiral wavefront beacon in conjunction with a standard (circular) acoustic modem, Chip Scale Atomic Clocks (CSAC), acoustic modems, state-of-the-art adaptive underwater networking and Cooperative Localization (CL) algorithms. Using the difference in time of arrival between the spiral wavefront and the modem circular wavefront, receivers will be able to determine the bearing to the source using only one hydrophone. Synchronizing vehicles Chip Scale Atomic Clocks (CSAC) with the beacon at the beginning of the mission and during the longer missions will ensure the vehicles ability to also calculate their distance from the beacon upon every message reception.