Distributed Intelligent Control Of The Multiple AUVs

In the large scale underwater applications such as oceanographic sampling and renaissance, heterogeneous cooperation and highly reliable Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) system, the multiple AUV system have more advantages than single AUV. The distributed cooperation control architecture and strategy are discussed here, which should be one of the most urgent tasks.For the task oriented system, we should consider not only the loosely coupled cooperation such as autonomous task allocation, but also the real time tightly coupled coordination within the limited capacity of AUV. The "Market" framework is used in this thesis as a mimic simulation of the economic trade to give a reasonable solution for the loosely coupled cooperation control, considering the imperfect communication and the AUV's limited capability. The numerical results of the v-MDTSP tasks with deferent conditions show that the "marginal cost" based "Market" framework could get better communication tolerance, better scalability and lower local computation complexity. With the additional "single task profit" auction method, an AUV can acquire more information, which has considerably improved the final optimization results in most cases compared with the Genetic Algorithm based central controller. As a distributed cooperation, the "Market" framework can get simpler and more effective solutions for the more complex cooperation control with different coupled tasks and time constraints. The behavior based controller is designed for the tightly coupled coordination tasks, which have faster control steps and more data exchanges. A new AUV control architecture, S~2BHCA, based on the "Skill" concept is developed to support the two different cooperation: the loosely coupled cooperation by the task level controller and the tightly coupled coordination by the "Skill" level controller.In order support the multiple AUV system development, a new MAS based scalable underwater simulation world and a sea test demonstration system include two AUVs have been realized. The simulation results and the trials show that the...