THE AUTONOMOUS UNMANNED VEHICLE WORKBENCH: MISSIONPLANNING, MISSION REHEARSAL, AND MISSION REPLAY TOOLFOR PHYSICS-BASED X3D VISUALIZATION

摘要

In recent years, numerous military and civilianrnapplications for autonomous underwater vehiclesrnhave been identified or proposed and a number ofrnproduction and research vehicles have beenrndeveloped to address many of these. However, thernuse of vehicle-specific data formats and missionrnplanning systems hampers cooperative researchrnefforts by fostering the implementation of stove-pipernsystems. Additionally, the lack of physics-basedrnplayback and tightly coupled two- and threedimensionalrn(2D/3D) visualization environmentsrntypically precludes realistic mission rehearsal orrnhigh-fidelity playback.rnThe Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) AutonomousrnUnmanned Vehicle Workbench (AUVW) bridges therngap between dissimilar vehicles by providing arnmission planning, rehearsal, and replay tool forrnarbitrary unmanned vehicles (UV). The AUVW isrndesigned around the capabilities of the AutonomousrnVehicle Control Language (AVCL), an ExtensiblernMarkup Language (XML) vocabulary for task-levelrnmission specification, vehicle telemetry, controlrnorders and sensor data. Also integral to the AUVWrnis physical simulation of planned missions in a virtualrnenvironment (VE) using a six degree of freedom (6-rnDOF) vehicle-response model that is parameterizedrnfor a variety of vehicles.rnThe vehicle-independent nature of AVCL, enablesrnthe AUVW user to design and test missions forrnarbitrary vehicles using a single format. Oncernsatisfactory performance is obtained in the virtualrnenvironment (VE), the AVCL mission is transformedrnto vehicle-specific format using the ExtensiblernStylesheet Language for Transformations (XSLT)rnand loaded into the vehicle. In similar fashion,rnvehicle-specific data can be parsed using a contextrnfree grammar (CFG) and transformed into AVCL forrnediting and testing with the AUVW.rn3D visualization utilizes a variety of archived andrnautogenerated scenes authored in Extensible 3Drn(X3D) graphics, the ISO-approved standard for 3Drngraphics on the web and the Xj3D open-sourcerntoolkit for X3D-compliant application development.