Today, state of the art for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) mission planning is simpleplanners that are used to specify a set of waypoints that each AUV must travel towards in order tofulfill its mission. The Mine Countermeasures (MCM) Operator and Survey Specialist must havein depth knowledge of the AUV systems, concepts of operation, AUV payload sensors and theirlimitations in order to plan and coordinate multiple missions and ensure that the fleet meets themission goals. The result is resource intensive, requiring complex systems training and productsfrequent sortie and mission errors due to vehicle de-confliction mistakes and labor intensive,manual keystroke entry of the mission parameters. Recently, SeeByte has introduced newly developedAutonomous Mission Planners that do not require the operator to have detailedknowledge of each specific vehicle and sensor envelope. This information is acquired directlyfrom the AUV. With this software, vehicle and sensor fits that are available can announce themselvesand be used opportunistically, with new missions readily available if the operational constraintschange, or similarly, if a vehicle encounters a degradation or failure. The autonomousmission planner can plan vehicle sorties directly to satisfy the overall mission goal, as dictated bythe MCM Commander and relayed through his Tactical Decision Aid (TDA). Autonomy packageswithin the software are then responsible for allocating tasks to the vehicles available. Theplanner is capable of breaking mission goals down into sub-goals, with multiple vehicles undertakingthe sub-goal best suited to its situation. Importantly, the AUVs, aware of each others’ distinctplans, utilize low-bandwidth communications in order to ensure that throughout the missioneach AUV resource is used to optimally accomplish the mission goal. This talk will present anddemonstrate the capabilities that it can offer the MCM Operator and the Underwater Survey Specialist.It will show how these advances stand to increase AUV availability, efficiency, and missionsuccess, reduce time and errors when generating and validating sorties, and reduce trainingrequirements.
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