Sensor-based motion planning for autonomous vehicle teams

This paper employs a computational optimal control framework to develop a mission planning tool for a team of heterogeneous unmanned vehicles conducting a nominal mine countermeasures (MCM) mission. We first describe our motivation for developing vehicle-specific sensor models for unmanned surface and underwater vehicles working collaboratively to detect mines. Next, we describe the sonar detection models used to evaluate the performance of a long-range, forward-looking detection sonar and a high-resolution sidescan sonar deployed from these unmanned vehicles. Results from multiple computer simulations which highlight the flexibility and utility of this solution framework are presented.Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER