Adaptive Sampling with a Fleet of Autonomous Sailing Boats Using Artificial Potential Fields

Autonomous sailing boats are an attractive solution to perform measurements at sea thanks to their low energy consumption. A fleet of such vehicles can also be used for adaptive sampling of an environmental field. In previous work, artificial potential fields have been used successfully in a local and real-time planner to carry out the autonomous navigation of one sailing boat. In this paper, we first extend the previous method to include marine current in the local planning and show how this extension can improve the safety and navigation performances in the case of strong marine current. Next we show how the same planning method can be used to control a formation of sailboats and perform adaptive sampling of some natural quantities and can be easily tuned to exhibit different behaviors such that way-point reaching, gradient or isoline following.