Multi-robot bearing-only tracking of an underwater target taking into account the sound propagation delay

Abstract

Bearing Only Tracking of an underwater moving acoustic source employing multiple moving sensors is addressed in this paper. The vehicles need to communicate to exchange their local measurements coming from Passive Acoustic Monitoring sensors with an inevitable communication latency and packet loss, which has to be to be properly addressed in the algorithm. Additionally, The limited velocity of the sound in water causes the sensors to receive asynchronous data caused by the sound propagation delay. A distributed, iterative, optimization algorithm taking into account all these aspects is proposed and numerically verified on realistic simulations to validate the proposed approach.