Using a fleet of autonomous bottom crawling vehicles for surf zone operations

Multiple autonomous vehicles at low cost, small size, and expendable can be effective force multipliers for missions involving large and/or cluttered environments such as surf zone operations. The application of multiple, low-cost vehicles can provide pay-offs in increased mission effectiveness and reliability. The overall objective is to investigate the multiple vehicles group dynamics and control for a neutralization mission for bottom or buried targets using "bottom crawling vehicles". Issues are: control of spacing and integrated dynamics of the group; group configuration (e.g. size, Homogeneous vs. Specialized units); and individual crawler's minimum performance requirements.