A distributed motion planning approach to cooperative underwater acoustic source tracking and pursuit

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of underwater acoustic source tracking and pursuit with a team of autonomous underwater vehicles. Producing distributed control strategies in an underwater sensor network is not trivial since communication is primarily acoustic, which makes it intermittent and often plagued with major difficulties. For this reason, we propose an optimization scheme based on a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process for improving the performance of underwater mobile sensor networks, in which autonomous underwater vehicles (agents) play the role of moving nodes of a network. The key idea is to adjust the agents' guidance strategies to achieve coordinated motion planning, enabling optimal geometric configurations between the agents and the target to enhance tracking performance. Such a problem is cast as a multi-objective optimization problem that is solved through a receding horizon lookahead optimization scheme since we are interested in long-term tracking accuracy. The planning strategy is distributed using the sequential multi-agent decision-making paradigm to make the solving tractable since the optimization depends on the joint action domain. A distributed control framework has been implemented in a simulation environment to validate the proposed approach, which explicitly accounts for the major limitations imposed by acoustic communications.