On the Influence of Localisation and Communication Error on the Behaviour of a Swarm of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

The long term goal of this research is to develop a swarm of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), which can be used to locate submarine sources of interest, like dumped radioactive waste or ammunition. The overall search strategy of the swarm is based on particle swarm optimisation (PSO). Standard PSO relies on correct localisation and timely communication in order to be able to converge towards the global optimum. However, underwater communication is slow and unreliable and the exact localisation of an AUV is difficult. Therefore, this paper presents an empirical study of the effect of communication and localisation error on the convergence capabilities of PSO. A simulation based on cellular automata is presented and a model of communication and localisation error is incorporated into the PSO. It is shown that both types of errors have a negative effect on the performance of the search, with localisation error having the greater contribution.