Efficient Complete Coverage Path Planning for Collaborative Survey Tasks by AUVs

The need for survey tasks by AUVs is constantly increasing due to heavily used port facilities and the need for environmental monitoring. The use of teams of AUVs can significantly accelerate the complete coverage but requires greater planning effort. This paper describes approaches to plan and adapt collaborative survey tasks in real time by decomposing the work space with computational geometry methods into more easily solvable sub-problems. The order is then determined and the sub-problems are then distributed among the agents through various methodologies such as auction procedures.