MULTI-AGENT UNMANNED UNDERWATER VEHICLE VALIDATION VIA ROLLING-HORIZON ROBUST GAMES

Abstract

Autonomy in unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) navigation is critical for most applications due to inability of human operators to control, monitor or intervene in underwater environments. To ensure safe autonomous navigation, verification and validation (V&V) procedures are needed for various applications. This thesis proposes a game theory-based benchmark validation technique for trajectory optimization for non-cooperative UUVs. A quadratically constrained nonlinear program formulation is presented, and a "perfect-information reality" validation framework is derived by finding a Nash equilibrium to various two-player pursuit-evasion games (PEG). A Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) point to such a game represents a best-case local optimum, given perfect information available to non-cooperative agents. Rolling-horizon foresight with robust obstacles are incorporated to demonstrate incomplete information and stochastic environmental conditions. A MATLAB-GAMS interface is developed to model the rolling-horizon game, and is solved via a mixed complementarity problem (MCP), and illustrative examples show how equilibrium trajectories can serve as benchmarks for more practical real-time path planners.