Autonomous multi-robot tracking system for oil spills on sea surface based on hybrid fuzzy distribution and potential field approach

Abstract

Oil spill, may happen as a result of the offshore well vessel failures. The precise information about the location and real-time situation of the oil spill is essential to perform an efficient treatment of these environmental catastrophes. A novel approach of multi robot's system which can navigate autonomously and track oil spill on the sea surfaces. This system is able to self-adapt and path plan amidst environmental changes, including the temporospatial variation of the oil concentration. The method consists of two main parts, which are the modelling of the oil spill, the tracking system and autonomous control of the robots. The simulated model depicts the morphological complexities of the spatiotemporal changes in the oil spills. The fuzzy controller is designed to control the robots to control nonlinear and non-crisply distributed water surfaces where oil pollution occurs. Meanwhile, the multi-robot path planning system hybridised with artificial potential field approach to avoid the collision. Several numerical simulations with different scenarios are done to show the robustness of the methods, based on the accuracy and precision of tracking. The evaluation with the simulated ground truth demonstrates that accuracy and precision of the tracking system are more than 70 and 80 percent respectively.