Collaborative search planning for multiple vehicles in nonhomogeneous environments

The planning of search paths of multiple unmanned undersea vehicles is complicated by taking into consideration the effects that potential cross-vehicle collaboration may have on their performance. Such collaboration is expected to have the effects of increasing the quality and accuracy of search over that which is obtainable from independent search paths. These problems are important in the undersea domain, where limited communications and uncertain performance characterizations provide a challenge to conduct meaningful search operations in a reasonable amount of time. In this paper, we develop a modeling framework that accounts for the effects of collaborating searchers in a spatially variable undersea environment. The impact of this modeling framework on search plan generation and evaluation is then illustrated using simulation examples.