Comments: download file (cintal_rep).
Ref.: SiPLAB Report 01/18, SiPLAB, University of Algarve, January 2018.
Abstract
Project WiMUST aims at developing, and testing at sea a fully unmanned solution for
shallow water high-resolution geoacoustic surveying of the sub-bottom sediment layers,
using multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) carrying short hydrophone arrays.
The freedom of movement of the fleet of AUVs requires careful mission planning and
coordinate vehicle navigation and control to keep formation among vehicles and relative
to the source(s). The ensemble of hydrophone receivers carried by the AUV fleet effectively
behaves as a distributed sensor array that, together with the source(s) field, forms a survey
geometry. This report discusses strategies for determining survey geometries for optimal
or near optimal bottom properties estimation based on a priori environmental data of the
survey area. These strategies are then implemented under the form of a computational
tool, the so-called Formation Optimization Tool (FOT), an important tool for survey
resources planning and an expected maximum performance indicator. The assertions of
FOT are demonstrated based on the example of preparation of the Survey’17 experiment
scheduled to take place in the area of Portinho da Arrábida, west coast of Portugal, in
January 2018.