Multi-objective autonomous vehicle navigation in the presence of cooperative and adversarial moving contacts

Abstract

Effective control of autonomous marine vehicles is a difficult problem that continues to increase in complexity as our aspirations and expectations become more ambitious. We discuss here two factors that lead this trend: the need to operate in environments with other moving vehicles, and the expectation that control reflect some sense of optimality where there is the opportunity and payoff for doing so. We present here a method for representing and solving multi-objective optimization problems suitable for controlling vehicles in such situations. This method is called Interval Programming (IvP).