Cooperative path-following of autonomous marine vehicles: theory and experiments

This paper describes the steps involved in the implementation of a general architecture for cooperative path-following (CPF) and contains an in depth discussion of the results of field trials with autonomous marine vehicles. To address the communication bandwidth constraints imposed by the water medium, we tested the performance of the CPF algorithm with different communication settings. We show the results of tests with almost continuous communications (with a period of 0.2 seconds between communications) and sparse communications (with a period of 4 seconds). For comparison purposes, we also show the results of trajectory tracking tests, which do not require inter-vehicle communications but are sensitive to external disturbances and temporary vehicle failures. In all of the tests we enforced a saturation on the thrusters of one of the vehicles to test the robustness of the algorithm.