Development of an intelligent and distributed low-cost platform for marine observations

In this work a novel intelligent and distributed low-cost platform for marine observation is introduced. The observatory consists of an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) and an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). This paper is focusing on potential search strategies for such an observatory. A novel search strategy based on Braitenberg search is introduced and the performance of this strategy is compared with the performance of inertia Levy-flight developed in recent work. Different settings of search algorithms are tested and their performance is evaluated using a computer simulation. It is shown that the combination of an ASV performing a pre-programmed search and an AUV performing inertia Levy-flight outperform a single AUV using inertia Levy flight for approximately 95 % of the chosen SGD positions. Both settings clearly outperform the introduced Braitenberg search.