Vehicle Management System for Operating Multiple Vehicles

Abstract

Multiple vehicle operation (e. g. cooperative object search) using autonomous underwater vehicles is an expected paradigm for deep ocean survey and exploration.In this paper, the system which consists of homogeneous vehicles is introduced to make a robust multiple vehicle system. The vehicle control architecture implemented in each member of the vehicles includes two decision making modules : one refers the individual environmental information gotten by its own sensors, and the other shares information received by other vehicles. By separating the decision maker into these two modules, the mission operator can easily write programs for each vehicle's behavior to generate an appropriate total vehicles' behavior. The performance of the vehicle's controlled by the proposed system is demonstrated on a multi-vehicle simulator, and the total behavior shows that the vehicles generate a formation which has not been explicitly given.