Adaptive control was applied to follower gliders in cooperating multiple glider teams on missions to delineate underwater oil patches. The influence of water currents on the motion of the oil patches was included. The cooperation strategy with adaptive control was compared with strategies without cooperation or adaptive control through simulation experiments. In addition, the optimal number of follower gliders in a team was assessed. From the simulations, strategies with adaptive control achieved a higher score of performance, defined as a measure of the percentage of valuable-rich information collected to the percentage of the mission area covered by information-rich patches; this measure was applied when the percentage of the area of information-rich patches was less than 60%. The cooperation strategy with adaptive control had a lower duty cycle and a longer mission duration, but had the best score of performance, especially for long-duration missions. Backseat driver hardware was installed on a Slocum glider to support adaptive control and a field experiment successfully realized cooperation between a simulated scout glider and the follower glider and the adaptive control of the follower. The experiment also indicated the limitations of timely completion of missions owing to the operating speed of the glider relative to that of ambient currents.
Keywords: Backseat driver; Cooperation strategy; Follower glider; Multiple underwater gliders; Oil spill.
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