Orbit Logic,the University of Colorado, and the University of California are developing a hierarchical autonomous mission planning and response capability for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to address the challenges associated with long duration operations. The research is innovating approaches to the exchange of information between collaborating vehicles enabling onboard decision-making to perform effectively despite communication limitations imposed by the underwater maritime environment. A novel decentralized data fusion approach is used to maintain the collective state awareness of a group of federated collaborating assets. This capability intelligently exchanges data (or strategically withholds data exchange) to minimize communications while maximizing knowledge. We also employ resource ferrying strategies to optimize collaborative operations for energy consumption. This technique, applicable to homogeneous or heterogeneous systems, has promise to significantly improve the overall effectiveness of long duration missions by intelligently distributing data and stored electrical energy. Finally, autonomous decision logic strategies leveraged from synergistic satellite autonomy research will overlay the data architecture. Research will be conducted to determine the most compact representation of asset information necessary to achieve robust, real-time adaptive mission performance.
Benefit: The proposed data architecture (and tools developed to be compatible with it) will allow cooperating autonomous assets to better meet specified mission objectives, particularly in cases where the operating environment and the duration of the missions can compound to result in a rapid divergence of conditions from the assumptions made at the time of initial planning and deployment. In particular, this will benefit Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) use cases involving many assets to achieve a widespread set of mission objectives in a large area with very limited (and highly variable) opportunity to intercommunicate and exchange information. These missions include hull and port inspections, mine countermeasures, marine husbandry (cleaning to improve vessel fuel economy), seabed survey, mapping, search, repair, recovery. The techniques to be developed will support homogeneous and heterogeneous systems of assets, which will include various classes of underwater robots with varying installed capabilities and performance, and surface-going marine vehicles which in addition to hosting sensors might also provide communication relay support and resource resupply roles. Benefits of the technology are not limited to the maritime military domain. Work being leverage for this research is already being applied to cooperative satellite autonomy for better situational awareness and protection. Many applications exist in the air domain involving Unmanned Air System support for a wide range of military, commercial and civil use cases. Examples include science data collection, surveys, search and rescue, environmental/agricultural/traffic monitoring, urban operations, disaster response and management, border monitoring, aerial photography, materials delivery to underserved areas, goods delivery commerce, communications support.
Keywords: Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV), Minimal Communication Operations, Decentralized Cooperative Coverage Control, Minimal Energy Operations, Multi-vehicle Collaboration, decentralized data fusion, adaptive mission planning
