Task consensus among a team of heterogeneous AUVs under intermittent communication

Using multiple smaller vehicles to accomplish tasks rather than a single larger vehicle has garnered significant attention in recent years. For these multiple smaller vehicles to operate in unison they need to exchange information frequently. Great progress has been made in this area where communication links are easily established and bandwidth is not a significant issues in modalities such as UGVs and UAVs. In domains where communication is an issue, such as underwater, novel approaches are needed to overcome these limitations. Some of these limitations include range, frequencies and bandwidth. In this paper consensus is defined as the awareness of each team member about its own task as well as the tasks of all the other members of the team. Communication is critical for achieving consensus. Limiting the message size and allowing messages to cascade through the team via multiple coordinated hops are significant challenges that need to be overcome. This paper addresses one such approach.