Framework for multiagent ocean monitoring: dynamic environment and reactive policy

This paper presents a patrolling system composed of multiple autonomous vehicles to survey a coastal area to monitor and supervise the presence of oil spill. The dynamics of the environment is taken into account to consider a system aware of the changing environment. Wind and currents are considered from Global Forecast System and the HYCOM consortium to create a map of accumulation of particles. A distributed reactive system is implemented to drive the autonomous agents, based on a policy considering the environment and other agents positions. The simulation of the environment is carried out using Gnome, a well-known tool for oil spill simulations, which is integrated into the framework.