Using a fleet of autonomous bottom crawling vehicles for surf zone operations

Abstract

Multiple autonomous vehicles at low cost, small size, and expendable can be effective force multipliers for missions involving large and/or cluttered environments such as surf zone operations. The application of multiple, low-cost vehicles can provide pay-offs in increased mission effectiveness and reliability. The overall objective is to investigate the multiple vehicles group dynamics and control for a neutralization mission for bottom or buried targets using "bottom crawling vehicles". Issues are: control of spacing and integrated dynamics of the group; group configuration (e.g. size, Homogeneous vs. Specialized units); and individual crawler's minimum performance requirements.