Path Planning for Multi-agent Jellyfish Removal Robot System JEROS and Experimental Tests

Over the recent years, the increasing influence of climate change has given rise to an uncontrolled proliferation of jellyfish in marine habitats, which has visibly damaged many ecosystems, industries, and human health. To resolve this issue, our team developed a robotic system to successfully and efficiently remove jellyfishes, named JEROS (Jellyfish Elimination RObotic Swarm). The JEROS consists of multiple USVs (Unmanned Surface Vehicles) that freely move in a marine environment to scavenge for and eliminate jellyfishes. In this paper, we propose a constrained formation control algorithm that enhances the efficiency of jellyfish removal. Our formation control algorithm is designed in consideration of the characteristic features of JEROS. It is designed to effectively work with the simple leader-follower algorithm. The leader-follower formation control does not work well if a reference path of the leader is generated without considering a minimum turning radius. In order to overcome such a limitation, a new path planning method—angular rate-constrained path planning—is proposed in this paper. The performance of the jellyfish removal function was tested at Masan Bay in the Southern coast of South Korea and formation control tests were conducted at Bang-dong Reservoir in Daejeon, South Korea.