Towards Streamer-Free Marine Seismic Surveys: The Role of Formation Control Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how formation control theory and network analysis can enable streamer-free marine seismic surveys, offering a theoretical framework and explicit control law to improve robustness against sensor failures.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of formation control to seismic surveys, providing explicit control formulas and robustness analysis for streamer-free data acquisition.

Findings

Feasibility demonstrated through theoretical analysis and simulations

Explicit control law for formation maneuvering provided

Robustness to sensor failures addressed

Abstract

We explore the applicability of recent advances in formation control theory and robust network analysis to the problem of designing streamer-free marine seismic surveys. To this end, we carry out a theoretical and numerical feasibility study to highlight the power and utility of this methodology, providing an explicit formula for the control law required to continually maneuver the data acquisition formation, and specifically addressing the robustness issue related to potential sensor failures.