UUVs 1
Wednesday 10th November 2010, 1100hrs–1230hrs
Chaired by Ralf Siegfried Distributed Cooperative Autonomous Systems using On-board Autonomous Managers Ms. Christiane Duarte, Naval Undersea Warfare Center (Division Newport), United States Successful operation of cooperative autonomous unmanned vehicle relies on real-time situational awareness and real-time task allocation to capitalize on the strength of a cooperative group operation. Decision-making in a cooperative mission is only as good as the information available. Information can present itself from different vantage points: from the human operator receiving data from varying sources to local information gathered at each member of the autonomous group. With these potential scope and time-varying information sets which can impact the performance of a cooperative distributed system, a powerful control paradigm is to allow the planning horizon to be shared between the human operator and the autonomous group. This paper focuses on three autonomous managers hosted on-board each autonomous system in a cooperative group that will “share” the planning responsibilities with the human operator. These management tasks will require awareness of changes in the situation and protocols for responding to changes based on guidance provided by the operator prior to deployment:
The mission manager for a continuous patrol mission must support re-tasking when the group configuration changes;
The communication manager can use different autonomy measures such as mobility to respond to the limitations on communications and connectivity in a cooperative;
The energy manager will enable a cooperative refueling scheme to avoid loss of systems at critical points during the mission. Protocols for these management tasks and results of their interactions during a series of multi-vehicle simulation will also be presented. GLINT10: At-Sea Experimentation of Multiple AUVs for ASW. Dr. David Hughes, NATO Undersea Research Centre, Italy Over the last few years NATO Undersea Research Centre (NURC) has been developing an autonomous underwater capability based on an AUV platform. As part of this program of work we have demonstrated real-time processing and introduced vehicle behaviors which are truly adaptive and relevant to ASW scenarios. For the first time in 2010 NURC has been able to deploy 2 AUVs both with towed arrays, acquisition systems and with enough onboard processing to automatically process the data in real time and to form tracks at the output of a Multi-Hypothesis tracker. The two vehicles, combined with our improved processing and tracking capability has allowed us to expand the scope of our research and to extend our work to investigate vehicle behaviors which are truly collaborative – adapting individual platform behaviour to optimize the system as a whole. In this paper we show how data, acquired at-sea, from the two vehicles can be fused and hence the World picture improved. Furthermore, we show how the development of algorithms and behaviours, which optimize overall system performance for vehicles can be described in an information theoretic framework in which the ‘best’ trajectory of the AUVs can be shown to minimize the overall uncertainty of the tracks produced. This approach is shown to put the role of our adaptive behaviours on a sound theoretical base. We will present results from two at-sea experiments which are being carried out in 2010 in which we have demonstrated several ASW relevant behaviours including:
A passive system cueing an active system;
An AUV optimizing its trajectory to improve its tracking capability on a single target;
An AUV optimizing its trajectory to improve its tracking capabilities on multiple targets. Sustainable Miniature Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (UUV) Sensor Platforms for Security, Commercial and Environmental Monitoring Dr Edward Carapezza, DoD/DARPA, United States This paper will describe new concepts for miniature Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (UUV) for use individually or in coordinated groups for security, commercial, and environmental undersea surveillance missions. Low power technologies and systems for propulsion, sensing, processing and communications will be described. To enable sustainable operations for months to years for ocean, coastal and riverine missions, alternative energy harvesting approaches and technologies will be addressed. Exploiting the appropriate naturally occurring solar, ocean or coastal energy sources will enable the employment of miniature, rechargeable unmanned undersea vehicles conjunctively with and without off-board networks of unattended sensors. The continuous operation of such systems will have a profound impact on our knowledge of marine biological, physical and chemical processes and systems and will also facilitate improved military and homeland security surveillance operations.
MAST timetable
|
