Research On Multiple Unmanned Ships' Cooperative Area Detection Based On Cellular Structure

With the rapid development of unmanned surface vehicle(USV)technology,using USV to carry out water survey task has become an important demand nowadays.With the increasing complexity in task needs and difficulty in the task,operating on a single USV can be inefficient.And in shallow water area or some narrow area under special mission environment,large USV can not normally pass through.In order to solve these problems,a cooperative area detection scheme of multi-USVs based on cellular structure is proposed by using small USVs developed independently by the laboratory.Specific research work includes the followings:(1)Aiming at the environmental region,this paper combines the advantages of grid method and cell decomposition method,and adopts the idea of cellular network,thus to propose a method of sub-regions based on cellular structure.On top of that,we divide the environment which is to be measured into several uniformly distributed regular hexagonal sub-regions,and then divide the obstacle area and the free area.The the same-sized hexagonal sub-regions and the equi-spaced adjacent sub-regions are conducive not only to the convergence of sub-regions,but also to the balanced allocation of mission areas for USVs in the later stage.(2)Aiming at the main traveling mode in the target area,this paper considers the characteristics of regular hexagonal sub-region and the structure limitation of laboratory small USV,thus we propose a main traveling mode based on Archimedean-like spiral,which not only has a high coverage rate in the regular hexagonal sub-area,but also ensures the uniform distribution of detection points in the course of USV traveling,and in the same time allows USV to travel in a uniform speed mode with high energy efficiency.(3)Aiming at the multi-USVs task area allocation and considering the characteristics of cellular structure in the area which is to be measured,this paper proposes a task area allocation method based on balanced energy consumption,which makes the size of the task area allocated to USV relatively equal,and ensures the relative balance of energy consumption of each USV when they travel in the same mode.(4)Aiming at the above research objectives,the simulation of relevant algorithms in MATLAB software environment is performed,which proves its feasibility.The preliminary outdoor experiments are carried out using USVs developed independently by the laboratory.