Fiscal Year	2011
Division	Graduate School of Engineering & Applied Science
Department	Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
Investigator(s)	Horner, Douglas P.
Sponsor	Office of Naval Research (Navy)
Summary	Feature Based Navigation for Multi-AUV Operations The goal of the research is to have a fleet of AUVs conduct a survey in a harbor environment and create a collaborative three-dimensional map. The AUVs would stay underwater for long periods of time which will require new techniques in Distributed Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (D-SLAM). Of primary interest is two aspects of the problem. The first is the ability of vehicles to leverage localization information from another vehicle using a series of time difference ranging messages using an underwater acoustic modem. The second is the incorporation of communications constraints within the D-SLAM framework to facilitate path planning and path following. Feature Based Navigation (FBN) Support - This work supports the joint collaboration between the Naval Postgraduate School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop a FBN capability onboard the NPS REMUS 100 vehicle. Previously FBN research was conducted onboard the iRobot Ranger and Transphibian AUVs. By putting the FBN algorithms onboard the NPS REMUS vehicle, researchers will have better access to sensory data (a navigation grade INS and DVL) to assess and improve navigation performance.
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