Overcoming Communication Limitations towards Task Consensus among a Team of Heterogeneous Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Abstract

When operating multiple autonomous vehicles there are two basic ways the vehicles can interact. They can either plan together, splitting up the tasks using some heuristic, and then complete tasks mostly independently or they can work cooperatively to complete tasks. Although these strategies may seem similar, the latter is very useful when multiple vehicles must work on a task at the same time (e.g. moving a large object too heavy for a single vehicle) or the task changes dynamically. This sort of cooperation requires frequent communication between the vehicles to ensure all members have the same information and operate in unison. The amount of communication isn’t generally a problem, except in domains where communication is much more constrained, such as underwater environments. To overcome the limitations of underwater communication novel approaches are necessary especially related to Medium Access Control (MAC). This paper addresses an approach to improving timeliness of communication while using Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) for MAC.