Development of a Steering Behavior for Decentralized Unmanned Underwater Vehicle Swarm Shape Formation

The Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific is exploring applications of swarm intelligence for unmanned maritime vehicles and is developing a low-cost test platform for experimentation with swarm concepts. The first task that will be tested with the swarm will be for it to school in a pre-defined shape that will emerge as a result of the individual agents’ local interactions with one another. This paper presents current progress in this project, particularly emphasizing the development of the steering behavior for the agents and its initial testing in a model environment that captures some of the critical constraints that we anticipate will impact the system as it develops. Though current testing has been limited to a highly simplified 2-D modeling environment, the results have been encouraging, and they provide a useful foundation for continuing this work. These initial results are presented along with a description of the steering behavior, the modeling environment, and the planned next steps for development.