Optimal Decision Making for Cooperative Localization of MAUVs

Cooperative Localization(CL) is a crucial cycle in navigation with Multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles(MAUVs). Due to the terrible underwater environment, measuring and communicating each other are still difficult challenges for AUVs until now, which both are also essential for CL to improve the position performance. Based on the two principles below: 1)minimizing the consumption of CL without loss of performance; 2)simplifying the communication topology, meanwhile, satisfying the communication requirements, we propose Optimal Decision Making(ODM) for MAUVs under multiple optional measurements and communication topologies. Then, considering two common cooperative manners: homogeneous MAUVs, heterogeneous MAUVs, ODM is presented in detail to examine two tradeoffs, not only between performance and consumption, but also between group performance and single accuracy. Finally, simulation results are provided to illustrate the superiority and practicality of the proposed decision strategy.