STARFISH - A small team of autonomous robotic fish

Abstract

STARFISH AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles) are a group of open architecture vehicles with high degree of modularity and well defined mechanical, electrical, and software interfaces. This enables the baseline AUV configuration to be simple and low in cost, while allowing its capabilities to be extended with various specialized modules depending on the need. Various AUVs can easily be configured in different ways to form a team of heterogeneous AUVs tailored to a specific mission. STARFISH AUVs employ a flexible Command and Control (C2) architecture that is capable of adapting to various configurations of AUVs. The vehicle command is loosely based on the C2 hierarchy in submarines, with software agents such as Captain, Executive Officer, Navigator, etc interacting to each other to control the AUV's behaviors. Numerous field trials have been conducted in open waters. Results from some of these trials are presented in this paper to illustrate the capability of deploying a heterogeneous team of cooperative AUVs. Specifically, the mission illustrated shows how a single AUV with high positioning accuracy can be used to reduce the positioning error of one or more AUVs with poorer navigational sensors.