Coordinated Tracking of an Acoustic Signal by a Team of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

We describe an approach to decentralized control and distributed data fusion that enables a team of autonomous underwater vehicles to cooperatively and autonomously localize and track a source of acoustic noise, and we report on field experiments that demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. A principal challenge of subsea coordination is the the extremely low-bandwidth acoustic communication channel that is available underwater. To address this challenge, and to enable coordination despite extremely limited communication, we have devised a new class of decentralized control algorithm that utilizes local models of the environment that are embedded onboard each AUV. Each AUV implements a centralized control law, but with locally estimated variables in the place of state variables that would normally be communicated between vehicles. We show both in theory and in successful field trials that surprisingly little communication is required to implement meaningful underwater vehicle coordination.