Distributed system of autonomous buoys for scalable deployment and monitoring of large waterbodies
Name
AURO-2018.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
3.73 MB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Zoss, Brandon Michael
Mateo, David
Kuan, Yoke Kong
Tokic, Grgur
Chamanbaz, Mohammadreza
Goh, Louis
Vallegra, Francesco
Bouffanais, Roland
Yue, Dick K. P.
Date Issued
2018
Journal
Autonomous Robots
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. The design, construction, and testing of a large distributed system of novel, small, low-cost, autonomous surface vehicles in the form of self-propelled buoys capable of operating in open waters is reported. We detail the successful testing of collective behaviors of systems with up to 50 buoys, achieving scalable deployment and dynamic monitoring in unstructured environments. This constitutes the largest distributed multi-robot system of its kind reported to date. We confirm the robustness of the system to the loss of multiple units for different collective behaviors such as flocking, navigation, and area coverage. For dynamic area monitoring, we introduce a new metric to quantify coverage effectiveness. Our system exhibits near optimal scalability for fixed target areas and a high degree of flexibility when the shape of the target changes with time. This system demonstrates the potential of distributed multi-robot systems for the pervasive and persistent monitoring of coastal and inland water environments.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/S10514-018-9702-0
