Formation control of marine veihicles via real-time Networked Decentralized MPC

Traditional ocean research and exploration usually require a lot of time, funds and, in general, resources. In the last years, mainly thanks to the GPS technology, unmanned small vehicles have been proposed for marine exploration and investigation. In this paper, a cooperation scheme (either for surface and underwater vehicles) is outlined for a multi-robot framework with a certain mission. The objective is translated into a formation control problem and the coordination is achieved through underwater sonar communication. A real-time implementable formation control strategy based on Networked Decentralized MPC is presented that drive each single vehicle. MPC allows to take into account for constraints, nonlinearities and exchanged information about future behaviours of the single agents. The decentralized strategy makes use of either local and received information for computing the best behaviour that optimises some objective function. A reconfigurable hierarchical structure is assumed for managing the formation. The real-time implementability is achieved using Multiplexed MPC and/or stochastic optimization algorithms for reducing computation times. Simulation results are provided for comparing the presented algorithms.