Toward informative planning for cooperative underwater localization

Abstract

This paper reports on an algorithm for planning a practical trajectory for a surface vehicle that provides range measurements to an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). We consider server-client cooperative localization in which a server vehicle provides relative range constraints to minimize the uncertainty of a client vehicle. Our approach assumes the nominal client mission plan is available and draws potential server trajectories from a set of parameterized trajectory classes. We provide a comparative evaluation over several simulations, for both a single client and multiple clients, demonstrating that our algorithm computes operationally practical server paths and performs well relative to existing planning frameworks.