Tracking ocean fronts with multiple vehicles and mixed communication losses

We make two contributions toward integrated monitoring over large spatial scales, with multiple collaborating vehicles. Our focus is dynamic ocean features such as fronts and plumes. To support strong networked-control designs, we first develop a clean linear time-invariant framework for tracking features, that directly couples the global structure of the process to vehicle positioning. To address the packet loss inherent in underwater acoustic communications, we then extend the synthesis technique of Imer et al. [1] to the case where measurements and control commands suffer loss with differing statistics among the multiple channels. Simulations show that the integrated feedback system achieves good performance in front tracking.