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A significant problem in missions employing multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) is the difficulty of communicating effectively. This challenging communication problem is best addressed in the realm of mobile, ad hoc networking (MANET). This paper describes work towards improving location-aware source routing (LASR), our modification of the dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol to add location awareness and link quality metrics. Specifically designed for use in underwater acoustic networks, LASR is explained and results of investigations into the sensitivity of LASR to medium-model error, tracking error and compression of communicated routing data are shown.

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Dynamic and unstructured multiple cooperative autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) missions are highly complex operations, and task allocation and path planning are made significantly more challenging under realistic underwater acoustic communication constraints. This paper presents a solution for the task allocation and path planning for multiple AUVs under marginal acoustic communication conditions: a location-aided task allocation framework (LAAF) algorithm for multitarget task assignment and the grid-based multiobjective optimal programming (GMOOP) mathematical model for finding an optimal vehicle command decision given a set of objectives and constraints. Both the LAAF and GMOOP algorithms are well suited in poor acoustic network condition and dynamic environment. Our research is based on an existing mobile ad hoc network underwater acoustic simulator and blind flooding routing protocol. Simulation results demonstrate that the location-aided auction strategy performs significantly better than the well-accepted auction algorithm developed by Bertsekas in terms of task-allocation time and network bandwidth consumption. We also demonstrate that the GMOOP path-planning technique provides an efficient method for executing multiobjective tasks by cooperative agents with limited communication capabilities. This is in contrast to existing multiobjective action selection methods that are limited to networks where constant, reliable communication is assumed to be available.

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