It has been recognized for over a decade that robotic and autonomous systems will become a major component of the US military warfighting capability. In working to create flexible, robust robotic capabilities, engineers have found that developing and testing these systems carry unique challenges that arent easily solved through the application of traditional engineering tools and processes. One area that has great potential, however, to enhance robustness, reduce costs, and shorten development time is the application of engineering modeling and simulation (M&S). In this program, QS proposes to create ANVEL Coastal: Autonomous System Simulation Tool for Land/Sea Systems. ANVEL Coastal will be a multi-domain engineering M&S tool specifically built to support the development, testing, and validation of robotic systems that operate in land, sea, or in the transition between them. The system will build upon an existing ground-focused autonomous system M&S tool, Autonomous Navigation Virtual Environment Laboratory (ANVEL), which is widely used by the DoD and other organizations in its ground robotics efforts. ANVEL Coastal will provide a desktop simulation capability that can be adapted and used in a variety of configurations to support development and testing of autonomous sea/land/transitional systems.
Benefit: If successful, this program will produce a new (and really only) flexible, highly-visualized robotics M&S tool that can be leveraged by those developing and testing autonomy systems for amphibious assault and coastal-area related operation. It will enable researchers and developers to test and verify their algorithms and software in multiple hardware and software-in-the-loop configurations prior to deploying on actual vehicles. Further, it would developers and testers to exercise the systems from the desktop in environments and configurations that represent edge cases that would otherwise be difficult, expensive, or dangerous to test with in the real world. ANVEL Coastal would expand the current ANVEL software to make it useful for Navy staff and contractors, and bridge the gap between development tools used/performed for ground-based systems with those that are being developed for water-based systems.
Keywords: Unmanned, Unmanned, amphibious, Teleoperation, Algorithms, Modeling and Simulation, vehicle, Autonomous, Robotics
