17 accepted papers
Teams of cooperating autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) rely on acoustic communication for coordination, yet this communication medium is constrained by limited range, multi-path effects, and low bandwidth. One way to address the uncertainty associated with acoustic communication is to learn the
We present the results of experiments performed using a team of small autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to determine the location of an isobath. The primary contributions of this work are (1) the development of a novel objective function for level set estimation that utilizes a rigorous assessme…
Autonomous underwater vehicles often perform surveys that capture multiple views of targets in order to provide more information for human operators or automatic target recognition algorithms. In this work, we address the problem of choosing the most informative views that minimize survey time while…
We consider the coordinated escort problem, where a decentralised team of supporting robots implicitly assist the mission of higher-value principal robots. The defining challenge is how to evaluate the effect of supporting robots' actions on the principal robots' mission. To capture this effect, we…
We present the results of experiments performed using a small autonomous underwater vehicle to determine the location of an isobath within a bounded area. The primary contribution of this work is to implement and integrate several recent developments real-time planning for environmental map-ping, an…
As the future of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) deployments tends to multi-vehicle systems, new approaches in coordination and control are needed. In this work, we consider the problem of simultaneous survey and inspection where one vehicle dynamically discovers objects while another vehicle mu…
We provide theoretical bounds on the worst case performance of the greedy algorithm in seeking to maximize a normalized, monotone, but not necessarily submodular ob-jective function under a simple partition matroid constraint. We also provide worst case bounds on the performance of the greedy algori…
Planning the motion of bearings-only sensors is critical for enabling accurate tracking of the positions of moving targets. In this paper, we demonstrate planning the observer's motion over horizons greater than one step for estimating an unknown and varying number of indistinguishable, maneuvering…
This letter studies the problem of data collection where an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is required to inspect several goals while staying within the communication range of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) moving along a predefined path. A reward is associated with each inspected goal, and,
In this letter we propose an algorithm to actively track multiple moving targets using a bearing-only sensor in the presence of merged measurements. Merged measurements arise from sensor resolution constraints and therefore targets that are close in relative bearing to the sensor get reported as a s
We present a multi-agent approach to receding horizon path planning that utilizes terminal costs. We show that the value of the receding horizon paths produced using the proposed methods have a guaranteed lower bound that can be determined using any readily-available, naive solution. We present a mo…
Ocean Worlds represent one of the best chances for extra-terrestrial life in our solar system. A new mission concept must be developed to explore these oceans. This mission would require traversing the 10s of km thick icy shell and releasing a submersible into the ocean below. During the transit of…
The computational difficulty of planning search paths that seek to maximize a general deterministic value function increases dramatically as desired path lengths increase. Mobile search agents with limited computational resources often utilize receding horizon methods to address the path planning pr…
We present an anytime Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithm to generate real-time, near-optimal search paths in large subsea environments. The MCTS planner continuously builds a tree of the search space until either the allowed time per move is reached or the budget constraint for the search miss…
We present a novel method of using terminal costs in the construction of a receding horizon search path. We prove that the proposed method of constructing search paths provides a theoretical lower bound on the performance of the search path. Our result can be interpreted as ensuring that the recedin…
This paper studies the problem of autonomous data collection where an underwater vehicle is required to reach several target regions within a specified time limit. The proposed approach takes into account the vehicle dynamics, the time-varying ocean currents, and the obstacles in the region in order
We address the challenge of computing search paths in real-time for subsea applications where the goal is to locate an unknown number of targets on the seafloor. Our approach maximizes a formal definition of search effectiveness given finite search effort. We account for false positive measurements…