An Exact Decentralized Cooperative Navigation Algorithm for Acoustically Networked Underwater Vehicles with Robustness to Faulty Communication: Theory and Experiment
Abstract
This paper reports on an exact real-time solution for server-client cooperative localization over a faulty and extremely bandwidth-limited underwater communication channel. Our algorithm, termed the OSM, enables a `server' vehicle to aid the navigation of multiple `client' vehicles via a novel representation of the server's pose-graph that is robust to communication packet loss. This transmitted pose-graph can be used in conjunction with a DEIF on the client to reproduce the corresponding two-vehicle server-client centralized result exactly. We present a full comparative evaluation for the first-ever real-time field implementation of the proposed algorithm for a multi-agent AUV network using underwater acoustic modems to communicate in a synchronous-clock transmission framework.