Maritime Search and Rescue Based on Group Mobile Computing for UAVs and USVs

Accidents often occur at sea, so effective maritime search and rescue is essential. In the current process of sea search and rescue, the operation efficiency of large search and rescue equipment is low and it cannot provide stable communication link. In this article, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) are used to form a cognitive mobile computing network for co-operative search and rescue, and reinforcement learning (RL) is used to plan search path and improve communication throughput. Based on the scene of marine search and rescue, the grid method is used to model the search and rescue area. Meanwhile, an intragroup communication architecture based on UAVs and USVs is designed to assist intragroup communication by recognizing the link channel state between UAVs. Search and rescue path planning is carried out through the strategy iteration of Markov decision process (MDP). Furthermore, distributed RL is used to recognize the channel state and perform mobile computing, so as to optimize the data throughput in the communication group. The simulation results show that we have successfully completed the path planning task. Compared with conventional methods, RL based on different reward functions has better throughput performance under the same number of UAVs auxiliary communications.