Multi-Vehicle Mission Planner for Unmanned Vehicles

The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) will play a key role in littoral sea control, one of the transformational capabilities outlined in Naval Power 21, the Navy's vision for the future. The LCS will team with unmanned air, sea surface, undersea, and ground vehicles and will perform a variety of missions including anti-submarine warfare, mine warfare, and surface warfare operations. Mission planning tools are needed for the unmanned vehicles in the LCS team. The unmanned vehicles have their own vehicle planners to communicate individual plans to the vehicles. Some high-level planners exist that can provide top-level mission plans for groups of vehicles. However, a mission planning component is needed to take inputs from a high-level planner or work as a standalone component, generate mission plans for individual vehicles, and output the planning data in specific formats for each vehicle planner. The goal of this SBIR effort is to design and demonstrate a multi-vehicle mission planner for the team of unmanned vehicles to be used in conjunction with the LCS. An important aspect of this effort will be to investigate the interface issue for any high-level and vehicle planners to be used by the LCS.