Simultaneous Survey and Inspection with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles.

As the future of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) deployments tends to multi-vehicle systems, new approaches in coordination and control are needed. In this work, we consider the problem of simultaneous survey and inspection where one vehicle dynamically discovers objects while another vehicle must inspect as many of the objects as possible over the course of the mission. This requires a fully autonomous inspection vehicle, and to this end, we present a planning approach which couples sampling-based motion planning with timed roadmap constraints as well as a real-time execution framework. The methods presented address the underlying challenges that arise during simultaneous survey and inspection using AUVs, namely those of communication constraints, safety of navigation constraints, and dynamically discovered tasks. Additionally, we present field results for the simultaneous survey and inspection mission using teamed AUVs.