Cooperative navigation and control: The EU MORPH project

The EU MORPH project advances the use of a formation of five autonomous marine vehicles for mapping and scientific surveying of challenging, unstructured underwater environments as a means to overcome the limitations imposed by current single-vehicle based technology. We describe the test scenarios envisioned in the project and the requirements and constraints that they impose on the cooperative navigation and control systems that enable the concerted operation of the vehicle formation. We then provide a high-level description of each of the blocks that compose the final navigation and formation control architecture, developed at ISR/IST. We highlight how the systems take into account specific mission-related requirements and applications (e.g., typical trajectories employed for mapping and surveying). We describe the results of several trials at sea (involving multiple partners in the project and a group of heterogeneous vehicles) that illustrate the applicability of the MORPH concept in real operational scenarios as well as the limitations of the systems developed.