Information network communication and coordination for environmental surveillance
Contact: Professor Kristin Y. Pettersen

In order to extract the remaining oil and gas resources, it is necessary to extract oil and gas at large depths in environmentally vulnerable areas using subsea installations that combine both extraction and processing. The large depths, the environmental vulnerability and the need for subsea installations performing both extraction and processing, all require constant environmental surveillance. In addition there will be an immediate need for subsea intervention capabilities.

In order to provide continuous environmental surveillance of large areas, a network of autonomous (i.e. unmanned) units for information collection can be used. As opposed to using singular large manned units, a network of smaller autonomous cooperating units can cover a much larger area and also offer a continuity of surveillance that manned operations cannot provide (due to personnel costs and safety requirements). An information gathering network of satellites, UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), USVs (Unmanned Surface Vessels) and AUVs (Autonomous Underwater vehicles) can offer the level of environmental surveillance that is needed in environmentally vulnerable areas like the North and arctic marine areas. The research challenge in the development of this network includes

• Cooperative control and information optimization: Control systems for cooperative behavior of each node (satellite, UAV, USV, AUV) in the network in order to optimize the joint collection of information, and allowing for a mission based and automatic adjustment of the resolution and the propagation of the information gathering network. Cooperative control is an active research topic in the international research community, and the research will build on current results of our research group on cooperative control, including
  
  • E. Børhaug, A. Pavlov and K.Y. Pettersen, “Straight Line Path Following for Formations of Underactuated Underwater Vehicles”, in Proc. 46th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, New Orleans, LA, USA, Dec. 12-14, 2007.
  • A. Pavlov, E. Børhaug, E. Panteley and K.Y. Pettersen, ”Straight line path following for formations of underactuated surface vessels”, in Proc. IFAC Symposium on Nonlinear Control, Pretoria, South Africa, August 22-24, 2007.
  • Krogstad T., J T. Gravdahl, 6-DOF mutual synchronization of formation flying spacecraft, proc. of the 45th IEEE CDC, San Diego, December 2006.
  • Group Coordination and Cooperative Control, Eds. K.Y. Pettersen, J.T.Gravdahl and H. Nijmeijer, Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences, Volume 336, Springer-Verlag, 2006, ISBN: 3-540-33468-8

• Communication failures/restrictions: The information collection network must handle situations where the communication links are not continuous. The communication links between the different nodes may vary with time, and it is important to create a network that can handle these communication failures and also specify the degree of communication failure that the network can tolerate. Furthermore, time-delays is inherent in acoustic underwater communication, and must be taken into account. This research challenge will be approached using a combination of graph theory and nonlinear control systems theory for which preliminary results are developed by our research group in
  
  
  • E. Børhaug and K.Y. Pettersen, “Formation control of 6-DOF Euler-Lagrange systems with restricted inter-vehicle communication”, in Proc. 45th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, December 13-15 2006, San Diego, California, pp. 5718-5273.
  • E. Børhaug, R. Ghabcheloo, A. Pavlov, K.Y. Pettersen, A. Pascoal and C. Silvestre, “Formation control of underactuated marine vehicles with communication constraints”, in Proc. 7th IFAC Conference on Maneouvring and Control of Marine Craft, September 20-22 2006, Lisbon, Portugal.