Cooperative Navigation of Multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles with Logic Based Communication

In this paper we address the cooperative navigation of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), where navigation data is exchanged by the vehicles with acoustic modems, with the goal of improving their individual position estimates. The following key points are considered: (i) the fact that the system is continuous but the communications are discrete, and (ii) and the problem of deciding when should the navigation communications occur in order to minimize the communication traffic. We propose Logic Based Communication algorithms and compare their performances to the case that the communications are periodic. Simulation results, as well as preliminary field tests are presented and discussed.