STTR Phase I: Low-cost, onboard navigational autonomy and awareness for next generation UMVs

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project will be to reduce the necessary supervision and oversight required to operate multiple unmanned platforms in the execution of real-world, specific, task-based activities supporting search and rescue, routine mapping and intelligence gathering missions. Shifting control from teleoperation to autonomous navigation could enable first responders such as lifeguards, to quadruple their capacity to assist in mass, maritime disaster, rescue scenarios for example. The current practice of a single lifeguard handling 3 victims in a routine riptide incident will be improved by a factor of four, through the use of this technology, allowing lifeguards to better manage mass-scale, maritime disasters that may involve a hundred victims. Human lifeguards could focus on those people requiring immediate personal assistance (unconscious, hypothermia or children for instance), while unmanned maritime platforms could be tasked with responding to clusters of survivors better capable of self-rescue. Lifeguard assistant robots can also help with the over 400,000 lower profile events in the US each year. A robot could not only save lives but reduce risk to the lifeguard who typically has to swim or jet-ski out to provide flotation and rescue lines to victims in dangerous conditions. This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will develop increased intelligence and self-awareness for autonomous platforms that will result in an increase in operator ?trust? and allow potential operators who might consider autonomous platforms as ?unreliable? due to potential lost communication links, to have greater confidence in adopting these platforms. The technology will transition from far field navigation control (such as waypoint based navigation) to a near field control allowing precision delivery of the platform to the desired location in a dynamic environment. This capability would allow a maritime platform to autonomously drive to a designated cluster of survivors, slow down and behave according to known social proxemics so as not to further stress the victims. On board, vehicle health monitoring would allow critical system parameters to be reported and broadcast allowing ad-hoc networking with other platforms in the region. The overall objective would be to optimize the use of resources in any region and to quickly allow multiple lifeguard teams converging on a mass marine casualty event to interact but without having to pre-register or have a priori knowledge of each other?s systems.