Collaboration of Heterogeneous Marine Robots Toward Multidomain Sensing and Situational Awareness on Partially Submerged Targets

This article reports on a multirobot system that collaboratively obtains above-water, surface, and below-water information on a floating target. This capability allows a ship to autonomously survey and obtain situational awareness on a floating unresponsive target from a safe stand-off before inspecting it more closely or navigating around it. The target could be another ship, structure, or a navigational obstruction like an iceberg. The proposed solution is a collaborative system with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV), and an unmanned surface vehicle (USV). The UAV captures visual imagery to create a 3-D model of the target’s above-water geometry using photogrammetry. The UUV surveys the target’s submerged hull with integrated imaging and profiling bathymetric sonars. The USV hosts an intelligent mission-planning node which manages the robotic collaboration in a centralized architecture by autonomously planning and distributing the missions for the UUV and UAV. The intelligent node also adaptively plans the USV’s trajectory to support the other autonomous assets, specifically reducing and bounding the UUV’s state-estimate error through collaborative localization. The resulting above- and below-water sensor data is fused at the waterplane, using a sliding correlation algorithm, to yield a 3-D representation of the floating unresponsive target. The contributions from this article include the cross-domain robotic collaboration and autonomous mission-planning toward acquiring and fusing data from heterogeneous robots. The autonomous mission-planning and data-merging algorithms are presented. The setup and results from simulations and in-water testing with an UUV, USV, and UAV are described.