U2VIS: A Universal Unmanned Vehicle Interface System for Control of Heterogeneous Unmanned Vehicles (UXVs)

Rep Invariant will develop a service-oriented software architecture, the Universal Unmanned Vehicle Interface System (U2VIS). U2VIS will control heterogeneous unmanned vehicles (UXVs) from the submarine Combat Control System (CCS) stations. U2VIS will support several formal and de facto standards, including STANAG 4586 for UAV control, AS-4 JAUS for UGV and UMV control, and also MOOS and CCL for UMV control. U2VIS will be non-proprietary and platform-independent. It will be an open, service-oriented architecture for easy extensibility. Given that UAV control has already been demonstrated from the CCS, U2VIS will not trade off a reduction of functionality in already-demonstrated UAV control in order to introduce UGV and UMV control. Uniquely, U2VIS will also support optionally integrating UXV-vendor-developed software to provide best-of-breed interfaces when controlling certain hardware in specific missions for which the software is already tailored. In Phase I, we will fully develop the U2VIS architecture design, implement a simple demonstrator software package illustrating a few key concepts, and evaluate existing non-proprietary common-controller software for suitability as an implementation basis for the full U2VIS system in Phase II.