Coordinated operation of autonomous underwater and surface vehicles

Abstract

This work addresses the coordinated operation of an autonomous underwater vehicle and an autonomous surface vessel and its main goal is the development of an infrastructure that allows the surface vessel to dynamically position itself above the underwater vehicle while the later one is collecting data and navigating in long baseline mode using a set of beacons installed in the operation area. Besides a formal statement of the coordination problem, we present results both from real experiments and from simulations that illustrate the proposed solution.