Watercraft Controlled Approach System

Athena Technologies Incorporated (Athena) proposes to demonstrate a watercraft recovery control system to control, monitor and manage the recovery sequence of watercraft aboard small surface combatants. The solution leverages Athena’s capabilities in vision-augmented estimation, control and path planning, and the field-proven multistate nonlinear Kalman filter (KF) attitude solution currently used in Athena's GuideStar™ products. The objective is to provide active real-time tracking of multiple vehicles throughout the approach and recovery sequence, under a variety of environmental conditions, through sea-state 4 conditions. The proposed system will be used to track vehicle progress toward the recovery point, provide guidance recommendations to the operator, and evaluate the feasibility of a successful docking, generating warnings when appropriate. This information will be presented to the operator within an efficient, user-friendly interface, on a rugged outdoor-viewable display, which will be usable as a secondary display when the operator is directly controlling the vehicle during the recovery evolution.