Multi-unmanned Vehicle for Region Traversal Search Based on Ant Colony Algorithm

When there are many unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) for sea area search and underwater terrain scanning test, there are problems such as large amount of calculation and complicated task assignment. To overcome it, a complete region traversal search method with multi-USVs based on ant colony algorithm is proposed. Firstly, the standard rectangular search area is segmented according to the number of isomorphic USVs, and the multi-USV search is transformed into a region traversal search of a single USV. The region traversal search is based on grids algorithm. For a single search area, a hierarchical search strategy based on ant colony algorithm is adopted and two search modes, i.e. large-scale search and fine search, are developed. For the initial search, a large-scale search is used, and subdivision grids fine search is adopted for suspicious target areas in the large-scale search process. Finally, the practicality of the method is verified by simulation.