Ifremer's fleets of autonomous underwater vehicles for the localization of chemical/oil pollution
This paper presents a supervisory multi - agent control policy over an acoustic communication network subject to imperfections (packet dropout and transmission delay) for localization of an underwater flow source (e.g., source of chemical pollution, fresh water, etc.) with an unknown location at the bottom of the ocean. A two-loop control policy combined with a coding strategy for reliable communication is presented to perform the above task. A simulator is developed and used to evaluate the trade-offs between quality of communication, transmission delay and control for a fleet of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) supervised over a noisy acoustic communication network by an Autonomous Surface Vessel (ASV). It is illustrated that without compensation of the effects of severe random packet dropout, localization of an unknown underwater flow source is not possible for the condition simulated just by implementing a two-loop control policy. But, a two-loop control policy combined with a strategy for reliable communication locates the unknown location of flow source.
This paper presents a two-level multi agent policy developed by Dr. Farhadi (the CEO of the company) for the navigation and coordination of a fleet of Ifremer's autonomous underwater vehicles that are used for the localization of the source of a chemical/oil pollution with unknown location at the seabed. This paper was published in International Journal of Control. A pre-print of the paper is available in the following: