Multiple Autonomous Underwater Crawler Control for Mine Reacquisition
Douglas M. Welling, Dean B. Edwards · 2005
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are currently being used by the Navy for mine countermeasures. AUVs include both submarine and tracked crawlers. Recent search strategies have been implemented using both submarines and crawlers; submarines to sweep large areas to detect possible mines, and crawler to re-acquire the possible mines and perform classification. The primary scope of this paper is the control strategies for the crawlers to best cover an area. Both a motion controller and a mine reacquisition scheduling system were developed. Simulations were performed using Autonomous Littoral Warfare Systems Evaluator - Monte Carlo (ALWSEMC) to complete studies on optimal crawler control strategies. These simulations included 1 submarine and 3 crawlers. Two reacquisition scheduling systems were compared, one using a closest target strategy, and one using fuzzy logic that used additional information available to the crawler to best utilize time and resources. It was found that a fuzzy logic scheduling system outperformed the baseline system by reducing the amount of time to reacquire all targets.