DEfining and Leveraging digital Twins in Autonomous undersea operations (DELTA)

The objective of this effort is to assess and analyze the feasibility of extending digital twins to the undersea operational environment for autonomous vehicle applications, determine the effects of undersea intermittent communications on the implementation of digital twins in this domain, and define “digital twin” use cases in an undersea operational setting. The research questions go beyond simply feasibility and start to explore the techniques, uses, aggregation and layering, and composition for UUV fleet reasoning.  This effort seeks to address whether the implementation of digital twins can add value to the UUV mission space, ranging in scale from single UUV deployments to hundreds of sorties, and if so, how digital twins could be employed in a particular scenario. In addition, this effort will investigate the feasibility of translating digital twins to the unmanned undersea environment, which has not been deeply explored by current Navy applications. The traditional industry application of digital twins relies on robust and continuous communications with the deployed system, which are not always available in undersea operations. Therefore, determining how to address and overcome the intermittent and/or low-data rate communications challenge will be investigated. Lastly, this effort will evaluate return on investment factors and logistical considerations associated with undersea implementation of digital twins (e.g. what size/scale of deployed UUVs is necessary to begin realizing significant operational efficiencies or advantages across the fleet, and whether digital twins should be maintained centrally at an operations center, on an individual UUV, or a combination of both). Ultimately, the vision is that digital twins could assist the operational commander in better understanding what their unmanned assets are doing, particularly in times of reduced or no communications.