Ships confining an oil spill over: a scenario for automatized cooperation

Cooperation between robots is an important contemporary issue. This can be translated to the marine environment, either using marine robots or introducing automatics in the operations of ships. A general research on this kind of problems has started in our group, after several years of developing autonomous robotized ships. Several scenarios have been proposed for the study of cooperation details. This paper focus in a very interesting case, which is representative of other cases: several ships towing booms for oil spill over confinement. It turns out that the cooperation problem is not trivial. Along the operation several phases can be distinguished, and several coordination problems and needs appear. A computer simulation has been developed, after physics based analysis, and some initial coordinated control strategies have been proposed and tested. These strategies are supposed to be applied through verbal orders to captains. Along the operation phases the role of captains change, for an adaptive coordination. The paper introduces the research topic, then describes the scenario and its simulation, then focus on the cooperation problems emerging from the operation phases and the control and coordination solutions that have been proposed, and finally draws some conclusions.