Autonomous Navigation of Teams of Unmanned Aerial or Underwater Vehicles for Exploration of Unknown Static & Dynamic Environments

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new approach that is able to efficiently and fully-autonomously navigate a team of Unmanned Aerial or Underwater Vehicles (UAUV’s) when deployed in exploration of unknown static and dynamic environments towards providing accurate static/dynamic maps of the environment. Additionally to achieving to efficiently and fully-autonomously navigate the UAUV team, the proposed approach possesses certain advantages such as its extremely computational simplicity and scalability, and the fact that it can very straightforwardly embed and type of physical or other constraints and limitations (e.g., obstacle avoidance, nonlinear sensor noise models, localization fading environments, etc).