A Decentralized Three-Dimensional Control Algorithm forAutonomous Underwater Robots in surveillance application

Data collection from seabed has recently attracted considerable attention. The need to sense the underwaterworld drives the development of underwater sensor networks (UWSNs). Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) areincreasingly used as UWSNs in underwater missions. A convenient application of AUVs is underwater surveillance. Insuch operations, AUVs uniformly spread throughout a harbor entry or around a target object to detect any hostile orunexpected underwater intrusions. In this research, a completely decentralized three-dimensional deployment controlalgorithm for AUVs is proposed. The goal is to achieve the desired configuration and coverage to surveillance a targetobject on the seabed. The algorithm enables AUVs to autonomously decide on and adjust their speed and directionbased on the information collected from their neighbors. Each AUV selects the best movement at each step byindependently executing a genetic algorithm (GA). In the fitness function, the global average neighborhood degree isused as the upper limit of the number of neighbors of each AUV. Experimental results show that limiting number ofneighbors for each AUV can lead to a larger covered target area around object

Keywords:

Underwater sensor networks , AUV , Genetic Algorithm , three-dimensional deployment algorithm ,