Predictive oceanic features tracking with formations of autonomous vehicles
Chiara Mellucci, Prathyush P. Menon, Christopher Edwards, Peter Challenor · 2016
In this paper, a circular formation of autonomous vehicles is deployed such that the centroid tracks a temperature contour in the region of a tidal mixing front. Only local temperature measurements at the vehicles positions are taken for this purpose. The European north-west continental shelf sea surface temperature forecast data, provided by the Met Office, UK, has been used for this study as `prior information'. A probabilistic `belief' model of the temperature profile over the region of operation is developed using instantaneous measurements from the vehicles and the available forecast information. While tracking a contour, the `belief' model is updated and used for predicting local temperature gradient information. A quasi-continuous sliding mode contour following algorithm, which relies on local temperature measurements and the predicted temperature gradient, is proposed to steer the centroid of the formation.