Energy Efficient Autonomous Control of Unmanned Vehicles

In this project we will establish a general framework for autonomous control of unmanned platforms which balance energy efficiency with mission tasks with applicability to a wide variety of naval missions. We will apply this framework to a moving target search mission carried out by multiple, heterogeneous vehicles. This task will develop planning and autonomous control methods which optimize mission success given the total pool of energy available to all of the search vehicles. In particular, we will address the energy cost of communication and contact investigation. Simulations will demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods and lay the groundwork for hardware tests in Phase II.