Autonomous optimal rendezvous of underwater vehicles

• Main Author: Nicholson, John W.
• Other Authors: Healey, Anthony
• Published: Monterey California. Naval Postgraduate School 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10945/9956

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited === The capability of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to rendezvous with other AUVs was implemented and demonstrated in the Naval Postgraduate School ARIES AUV; providing a method of overcoming the severe range limitations of high-bandwidth underwater data transfer methods in order to enable accelerated access to data collected by a network of data-gathering survey AUVs. Rendezvous was implemented by autonomous reconfiguration of ARIES' operations, using a mission planning module to combine acousticallytransmitted rendezvous requests from survey AUVs with pre-stored survey AUV mission data to generate rendezvous missions based either on time-optimal or energy-optimal trajectories. The planning module efficiently generates rendezvous trajectories based on solutions derived using optimal control theory. A new third layer of control, based on a finite state machine, was added above ARIES' autopilot and mission execution functions in order to initiate mission planning and replanning, activate missions, sequence vehicle operations through seven defined states, control acoustic communications, and handle perturbations and missed rendezvous.