Nested autonomy for unmanned marine vehicles with MOOS-IvP

Unified command and control for heterogeneous marine sensing networks

Successful command and control (C2) of autonomous vehicles poses challenges that are unique to the marine environment, primarily highly restrictive acoustic communications throughput. To address this, the Unified C2 architecture presented here uses a highly compressed short message encoding scheme (Dynamic Compact Control Language or DCCL) to transfer commands and receive vehicle status. DCCL i...

Intelligent Autonomy and Performance Measures for Coordinated Unmanned Vehicles

This paper describes an autonomous Intelligent Controller (IC) architecture directly applicable to the design of unmanned autonomous vehicles and performance measures associated with intelligent autonomy. The vehicles may operate independently or cooperate to carry out complex missions involving disparate sensors or payload packages. An approach to measure the performance achieved with collabor...

Developing Autonomy for Unmanned Surface Vehicles

Evaluating Cognitive Architectures for Intelligent and Autonomous Unmanned Vehicles

Unmanned vehicles (air-, ground-, and sea-based), or mobile robots, have become increasingly important for both civilian and military applications and both intelligence and autonomy are important for these vehicles and their continued success. Many of these vehicles, however, currently require significant human supervision. For example, the Predator and GlobalHawk are essentially remotely pilot...

Autonomy Measures for Robots

Robots are becoming increasingly autonomous. Yet, there are no commonly accepted terms and measures of how “autonomous” a robot is. An ad hoc working group has been formed to address these deficiencies, focusing on the unmanned vehicles domain. This group is defining terminology relevant to unmanned systems and is devising metrics for autonomy levels of these systems. Autonomy definitions and m...