Network Design of Multiple Unmanned Surface Vehicle System and its Preliminary Field Test

Abstract

This paper presents the development of multiple unmanned surface vehicle system(USV), which consists of three USVs. Each USV is equipped with a lidar, a radar, and two cameras and is designed to have a capability to detect surrounding objects around it. In such multi-robot systems, handling network loads is an important design consideration; each vehicle is required to share its on-board sensor data with each other, but not all of data can be shared due to network load. Therefore, it is important to design the hardware and software architecture considering which data is shared inside each USV, and which data is shared between the vehicles. In this paper, the network structure design of the multiple USV system, which adopts ROS multimaster is introduces and the result of its preliminary field experiments are presented.