Multiple Autonomous Surface Vehicles for Autonomous Cooperative Navigation Tasks in a Marine Environment: Development and Preliminary Field Tests

This paper presents the development and field testing of multiple autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) for autonomous cooperative navigation tasks in marine environments. The developed ASVs were designed in a catamaran hull form, and various systems related to autonomous functionalities, including the electrical propulsion, wireless communication, and guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) systems, were integrated with the situational awareness sensor system. Because not all of the navigation and situational awareness sensor data can be shared owing to the large network load, the network communication and data protocol structure was designed to enhance the data management efficiency. Furthermore, for cooperative navigation between multiple ASVs, the network communication system was synchronously shared with motion information through a robot operating system (ROS) multi-master system. In particular, an autonomy framework with cooperative navigation and control was designed to enable autonomous cooperative maneuvering with multiple ASVs in a global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-denied environment. Furthermore, a cooperative navigation and control approach based on relative geometric information between vehicles was implemented in the framework, which incorporated the capabilities of following a predefined path and maintaining a specific formation based on the relative distance between ASVs. Moreover, to demonstrate the essential maneuvering and functional capabilities of the cooperative navigation and control approach of the developed ASVs, preliminary field tests were conducted in an inland water environment, and the test results are discussed in this paper.