Sensing and Control Technology to Assist in Vehicle Launch and Recovery

Arete Associates proposes an end-to-end solution to the challenge of at-sea launch and recovery of manned and unmanned vessels that incorporates the future state of the vessel into a robust crane control loop. By fielding an ocean penetrating, eye-safe LIDAR system on the recovery ship, the state of the vessel and the spectrum of the ocean waves in a field of regard around the vessel will be measured simultaneously at high resolution and frequency. Using the measured ocean-wave spectrum, the future position of the vessel will be predicted. Both the measured state and the predicted future state of the vessel will be incorporated into a crane control loop, that also comprehends the ship state and crane state, to both update the positioning of the crane and potentially send updates to the vessel. Since the future state of the vessel is included in the control loop, the sensitivity of the system to ocean-wave-induced fluctuations will be vastly reduced, especially at high sea state. Using Ocean Simulator software, a detailed radiometric LIDAR model, and control loop models, Arete will simulate the launch and recovery of at-sea vessels and establish a proof-of-concept of our approach for sea states 1-6.