Cooperative autonomy for contact investigation

Autonomous surface and underwater vehicles present a safe and low-cost solution for various contact investigation tasks, such as harbor surveillance for potentially threatening small craft or submarines. Since such a task may involve many contacts of interest, such as all the normal boat traffic in a busy harbor, a single unmanned surface vehicle (USV) is unlikely to be able to reasonably investigate all the contacts. Instead, multiple USVs can be deployed to investigate contacts simultaneously. In this paper we present a system that performs this task using the MOOS-IvP autonomy infrastructure. The approach is analogous to “zone defense” in basketball, and only requires that each vehicle have knowledge of its collaborators' positions. The resulting network requires only requires a small amount of communication data to be transmitted, making it applicable in the often low-throughput ocean environment.