Vehicle control architecture for operating multiple vehicles

Multiple vehicles operation (e.g. cooperative object search) using autonomous underwater vehicles is an expected paradigm for deep ocean survey and exploration. In this paper, bottom-up approach which means that the system consists of homogeneous vehicles, is introduced to make a robust multiple vehicles system. A vehicle control architecture implemented in each member of the vehicles includes two decision making modules: one refers the individual environmental information gotten by its own sensors, and the other shares information received by other vehicles. By separating the decisionmaker into these two modules, the mission operator can easily describe each vehicle's behavior to generate an appropriate total vehicles' behavior. The performance of the vehicles controlled by the proposed system is demonstrated on the newly developed multi-vehicle simulator (MVS), and the total behavior shows that the vehicles generate a formation which has not been explicitly given.