Mission Management for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles

摘要

The Naval Research Laboratory at Stennis Space Center is doing work that is focused on the development of environmentally centric and geospatially enabled unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) mission management software. This software provides specialized tools to help visualize conditions in the underwater environment during the preplanning stages and the execution of underwater missions. Visualization includes the ability to import datasets that represent conditions that would limit vehicle operation such as bathymetry and navigational hazards. Also supported are datasets representing conditions that will affect vehicle operations such as ocean current, salinity and sea surface height forecasts. Once these datasets have been added to the display, customizable thresholding tools are provided to allow identifying areas that present potential hazards to operation. A vehicle simulation based on the most common aspects of vehicle mobility combined with ocean current forecasts provides performance predictions that can be used to determine the validity of pre-mission plans and progress during mission execution. These predictions combined with thresholding analysis and other imported environmental conditions can also be used to automatically generate alerts for possible hazardous or counterproductive conditions. When these capabilities are used during the preplanning phase, they allow for fine tuning until an acceptable overall mission plan has been achieved. A key capability is allowing for the management of multiple vehicles regardless of vehicle type and configuration. During mission execution, vehicle position and status reports can be imported and analyzed. As new updates arrive, vehicle performance predictions can be updated by running new simulations using the latest environmental forecasts. These new predictions can then be analyzed to measure mission performance and to watch for possible pitfalls such as collisions with obstructions or other vehicles. This paper presents a discussion of the details of this software and its application.