A Mine Countermeasure System with Low-Cost AUV Swarms

The use of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) could provide a significant help to create fully automated and unmanned mine countermeasure (MCM) systems, with a significant reduction of risks for ships and their crew [7]. In this work, we present the design of an AUV swarm formation performing MCM operations, composed of a leader node equipped with all the expensive equipment needed to perform advanced tasks, and 2 to 4 follower nodes equipped with low-cost devices to perform mine detection and disposal tasks. All AUVs in the formation are equipped with low-cost acoustic modems to coordinate the mission. The followers track the mines, while the leader decides the formation path sending the next waypoint to each follower and, when a mine is detected it elects one of the followers for the mine disposal task. This hybrid formation both reduces the deployment cost and avoid loss of expensive equipment if something goes wrong. We simulate this MCM scenario with the DESERT Underwater frame...