Hierarchical MCTS for Scalable Multi-Vessel Multi-Float Systems

Systems of multiple low-cost, underactuated floats combined with fully actuated surface vessels can improve the scalability and cost-effectiveness of autonomous systems for marine science and environmental monitoring. Here, we consider a coordination problem where surface vessels must drop off floats at locations such that they are likely to drift to observe given points of interest, and later must pick up the floats for redeployment. We define the Multi-Vessel Multi-Float (MVMF) problem and present a hierarchical solution based on the Dec-MCTS algorithm. Our solution defines customised sampling, rollout, and action generation algorithms to accommodate the problem’s large search space and provide computational performance sufficient for practical application. We report analytical and simulation results that demonstrate the computational efficiency of our method and validate its behaviour in practical problems. These results immediately enable field experiments to progress the development of this exciting concept in multi-robot marine systems.