Role-based collaborative task planning of heterogeneous multi-autonomous underwater vehicles

Lanyong Zhang,Sheng Liu,Lei Zhang

doi:10.1177/1729881419858536

Abstract

The multi-autonomous underwater vehicles (Multi-AUVs) cluster is an important means to solve the marine tasks effectively. The heterogeneous Multi-AUVs are constrained by cooperative relationship, and a model of multi-autonomous underwater vehicles role-based collaborative task planning is proposed. The Multi-AUVs are set to different roles depending on the functional properties. To analyze the accountability of each role, and to ensure the reliability, the desired behavior and the estimate state of each role are described in the model. Task allocation needs to be implemented dynamically in path planning, for the existing of the cooperative relationships and the demand of tasks changes. Role-based task assessment and allocation methods are proposed to achieve dynamic adjustment of roles according to task requirements. Due to poor underwater communication conditions, the implicit coordination framework is implied to the coordinate information interaction to compensate the large delays in underwater communications and the reliance between Multi-AUVs. To adapt to the implicit collaborative framework and poor communication conditions, a variable communication radius (contract network) is proposed. The simulation result shows that the proposed method has well performance.

Highlights

Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is a highly integrated underwater intelligent vehicle which can perform complex marine tasks by carrying various sensors and special equipment
The role-based AUV classification method is adopted to make AUV change from passive receiving instruction information to active analyzing of other collaborative AUV status in the process of task execution, to achieve the reliability of collaboration under poor communication conditions and unknown environment
A rolebased task planning method was designed, which greatly increased the reliability of Multi-AUVs task execution

Summary

Introduction

Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is a highly integrated underwater intelligent vehicle which can perform complex marine tasks by carrying various sensors and special equipment. The role-based AUV classification method is adopted to make AUV change from passive receiving instruction information to active analyzing of other collaborative AUV status in the process of task execution, to achieve the reliability of collaboration under poor communication conditions and unknown environment It is the guiding ideology of parallel management. According to the requirements of tasks for AUV function modules, specific AUV is assigned to different roles, and AUV resource constraints and task attribute constraints are considered in the allocation process. The methods of dealing with the task allocation problem is as follows: instead of assigning each AUV to the role group, the heterogeneous AUV with the cooperative relation can form the cooperative relation, and solve each specific task.

Task announcement stage

Bidding stage

Monitoring stage

Conclusions