Ocean front detection and tracking using a team of heterogeneous marine vehicles

Ocean monitoring is an expensive and time consuming endeavor, but it can be made more efficient through the use of teams of autonomous robots. In this paper, we present a system for the autonomous identification and tracking of ocean fronts by coordinating the sampling efforts of a heterogeneous team of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The primary contributions of this study are (1) our algorithm for performing autonomous coordination using general autonomy principles: Sequential Allocation Monte Carlo Tree Search (SA‐MCTS) which incorporates domain knowledge into the environmental estimation through both augmenting a standard Gaussian process with a nearest neighbors prior and planning in a drifting reference frame, (2) our decision support user interface to help human operators oversee the autonomous system, and (3) the demonstration of the system's operation in a 2‐week long deployment in the Gulf of Mexico using a heterogeneous team of four Slocum gliders and two robotic ocean surface samplers. With these contributions, we aim to bridge the gap between state of the art autonomy algorithms and marine vehicle planning methods that have been tested in large‐scale field trials. This paper presents the first deployment of a general, heuristic‐based, multi‐robot coordination algorithm for an extended sampling mission.