Guidance and control of an ASV in AUV tracking operations

The following addresses the control of an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) to follow the trajectory made by an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) when the last is performing any given pre-programmed mission. In fact, it has been proved to be of great interest to have an ASV that could follow on the surface and even catch up the trajectory performed by the AUV, when executing a given mission. In order to achieve this desired coordinated motion between AUV and ASV, it would make sense just to program each of the vehicles with the same mission. However, due to the nature of vehicles, missions and also due to the localization system used, with this kind of solution some problems would arise, namely related with timings and synchronization, which are indeed difficult to overcome. The solution proposed here tries to estimate the AUV position, by tapping the signals exchanged between the former and each of the beacons of the acoustic localization network, and control and actuate the ASV in accordance.