Application of MOOS-IvP architecture in multiple autonomous underwater vehicle cooperation

This Paper describes an investigation into the cooperation of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles. A distributed control architecture MOOS-IvP (which was proposed by Newman at oxford and Benjamin at MIT) is applied to the multiple underwater vehicle system (MAUVS). In this architecture, a behavior based cooperative control strategy is used and a new method for behavior fusion is introduced. In this paper, the problem of behavior fusion is modeled as a multi-objective optimization problem and IvP model is used to ensure an optimal result in a timely manner. In order for MAUVS to work efficiently in such scenarios as oceanographic data gathering, a market-based approach to coordination of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles is proposed. It is shown in this paper that the market based approach can be integrated into the MOOS-IvP architecture so as to enable the MAUVS to work intelligently in complex tasks.