An exact decentralized cooperative navigation algorithm for acoustically networked underwater vehicles with robustness to faulty communication: Theory and experiment

Summary

Jeffrey M. Walls and Ryan M. Eustice, An exact decentralized cooperative navigation algorithm for acoustically networked underwater vehicles with robustness to faulty communication: Theory and experiment. In Proceedings of the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference, Berlin, Germany, June 2013.

Abstract

This paper reports on an exact real-time solution for server-client cooperative localization over a faulty and extremely bandwidth-limited underwater communication channel. Our algorithm, termed the origin state method, enables a 'server' vehicle to aid the navigation of multiple 'client' vehicles via a novel representation of the server's pose-graph that is robust to communication packet loss. This transmitted pose-graph can be used in conjunction with a decentralized extended information filter on the client to reproduce the corresponding two-vehicle server-client centralized result exactly. We present a full comparative evaluation for the first-ever real-time field implementation of the proposed algorithm for a multi-agent autonomous underwater vehicle network using underwater acoustic modems to communicate in a synchronous-clock transmission framework.

Bibtex entry