A Cooperative-Control-Based Underwater Target Escorting Mechanism With Multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles for Underwater Internet of Things

• Published in: IEEE internet of things journal Vol. 8; no. 6; pp. 4403 - 4416
• Main Authors: Zhang, Jie, Sha, Jianfa, Han, Guangjie, Liu, Jun, Qian, Yujie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 15.03.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Artificial potential field (APF); Autonomous underwater vehicles; autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs); Collision avoidance; Control methods; Cooperative control; formation control; Heuristic algorithms; Internet of Things; Monitoring; Object motion; Obstacle avoidance; Potential fields; Robots; Self organizing maps; Self-organizing feature maps; self-organizing map (SOM); target escorting; Task analysis; task assignment
• ISSN: 2327-4662; 2327-4662
• DOI: 10.1109/JIOT.2020.3026355

Escorting a moving object in a subsea environment with cooperative autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) is a typical subject in Underwater Internet of Things (UIoT) applications. It involves two issues that should be studied. First, a mobile task assignment method is required to lead the AUVs to the escorting positions; then, a formation control scheme should be utilized to safely escort the moving object to the destination. Accordingly, in this article, a comprehensive target escorting mechanism called the cooperative-control-based underwater target estimating mechanism (CUTE) is proposed, which includes a belief-function-method-based self-organizing map algorithm for task assignment and an artificial potential field-based formation control method. The task assignment method aims to establish smooth routes from the AUVs to the escort position while flexibly avoiding obstacles, and the formation control method aims to improve the monitoring coverage on the escort route by rotating the formation structure while following the moving object. Simulations show that the proposed CUTE method may be very practical in underwater target escorting scenarios.