Sensor-based motion planning for autonomous vehicle teams

Abstract

This paper employs a computational optimal control framework to develop a mission planning tool for a team of heterogeneous unmanned vehicles conducting a nominal mine countermeasures (MCM) mission. We first describe our motivation for developing vehicle-specific sensor models for unmanned surface and underwater vehicles working collaboratively to detect mines. Next, we describe the sonar detection models used to evaluate the performance of a long-range, forward-looking detection sonar and a high-resolution sidescan sonar deployed from these unmanned vehicles. Results from multiple computer simulations which highlight the flexibility and utility of this solution framework are presented.