Collaborative Mission Planning, Autonomy and Control Technology (CoMPACT) for Unmanned Surface Vehicles

In this paper, a Collaborative Mission Planning, Autonomy and Control Technology (CoMPACT) is presented for enhancing Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) capabilities in a maritime setting. CoMPACT uses a Finite State Machine (FSM) structure, can entail an array of communication architectures, and is demonstrated here for USVs under anti-submarine warfare (ASW), mine countermeasures (MCM), and other search and inspection tasks. FSM decision rules enable event-based or information-based transitions to govern the behavior of the autonomous agents. As part of this application and testing of CoMPACT, a study of innovative multi-agent cooperative search patterns conducive to reconfiguration (e.g. addition or deletion of agents from the search team due to reassignment or failure) is included with the simulation results. CoMPACT features several levels of autonomy, from completely tele-operated to fully autonomous mission completion, designed to reduce operator fatigue when several USVs are issued routine tasks.