FreeSwim: Autonomous Behaviors for Undersea Sensors

Future naval operations are expected to make extensive use of unmanned vehicles to support a range of operations, including intelligence gathering, mine warfare, force protection, and anti-submarine warfare. Current unmanned systems are typically controlled remotely by an operator who directly manipulates a control interface for the vehicle. The effectiveness of this approach is obviously limited in situations where high latency, low bandwidth, or frequently dropped connections will be experienced. Additionally, many autonomous control approaches that have shown promise in laboratory and experimental settings lack a rigorous formulation of behavior validation that is required to evaluate operational success. Our proposed effort, dubbed “FreeSwim”, addresses these challenges. FreeSwim enables intelligent autonomous behavior execution for unmanned subsurface vehicles by supporting remotely specified high-level mission control directives that are interpreted and executed by the unmanned vehicle depending on the constraints of the local dynamic environment. Behavior execution is validated relative to mission directive expectations by capturing and analyzing measures of performance and effectiveness. FreeSwim’s intelligent bandwidth utilization is designed for use in environments where remote human operation of the vehicle is unfeasible due to limited or unreliable communication capabilities.