Operational Planning and Programming of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
A. Kramer, D. Toms, R. Schrag, Dick Johnson · 2005
Future military autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) will perform multiple missions, handle many contingencies, and require broad domain knowledge. The intelligence of these multi-mission AUVs will require complex mission-contingent software. AB a result, programming an AUV for a mission promises to be an increasingly formidable task, even as it increasingly needs to be performed in the field by operational personnel, not computer scientists. We approached this problem by partitioning AUV programming into several software development stages and distributing the AUV intelligence in a hierarchical control system that supports partitioned programming. Our programming/control concept has three operational levels: 1) onshore development of operational tactics, standard rules of operation, and contingency responses; 2) pre-deployment programming by operational specifications that translate automatically into sortie programs made up of pre-defined tactics; 3) real-time dynamic situation assessment and planning according to the sortie programming. These programming/control operations are implemented in the Honeywell STASR AUV testbed, including: 1) an interpreted Control Planning Language that rep resents both tactics and sortie programs; 2) a graphical tactics and sortie programming system design; 3) a hierarchical tactics execution system. The STASR approach has been used to develop intelligent AUV transit tactics that have been tested in sortie programs for a variable mission environment.