Coordinated ASV-UAV control for marine collision-free navigation

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in replacing a unique, complex, and expensive vehicle equipped with several sensors with a group of small vehicles, each of them carrying fewer sensors. There are several advantages in these segmented architectures, such as cost, flexibility, redundancy, and robustness, among others. The advantage of segmented architectures is even more noticeable if the vehicles carrying those sensors have different characteristics or environments of operation, e.g. aerial, terrestrial or marine vehicles. This work proposes a multi-robot system where an autonomous marine vehicle avoids obstacles relying on aerial images provided by an autonomous flying vehicle. Both robots navigate in a coordinated fashion increasing the detection area and allowing to adjust the obstacle detection horizon. In order to validate the control scheme two simulation scenarios are presented.