A Load Balancing Behavior for Underwater Robot Swarms to Increase Mission Time and Fault Tolerance

The studies of the underwater world such as discovering, analysing and monitoring are still a complex challenge for marine scientists. Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are considered an appropriate solution for these objectives. The usage of AUVs in a swarm formation will increase the number of possible applications in research of the underwater world. Particularly in the field of environmental monitoring a swarm based approach could increase the efficiency of a task by parallelization, inherent redundancy and fault-tolerance. Our approach prolongs the overall mission time by a load-balancing behavior for a swarm of AUVs with consideration of energy and fault-tolerance. In general, the load-balancing behavior divides the swarm into two layers. The first one stays at the surface and saves its energy by limiting it motions and measurements. The other one submerges and performs the monitoring task. After that, an exchange between layers will be performed when one submerged AUV has a low energy level or becomes faulty, e.g. by damaged hardware parts like erroneous pressure sensors. Furthermore, this paper will be supported with a simulation of the proposed behavior.