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

Sonalysts is proposing to develop the architecture for the Multi-Mission Virtual UUV Environment (M2VUE), which is a system of Digital Twins (DT) in a virtual maritime simulation that is tied to its physical Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (UUVs) operating in the ocean. M2VUE is a scalable and flexible system that will provide UUV operators (from the task force commander down to the watch stander sitting at a terminal) with a view of what UUVs are doing and how their performance matches expectations, and predicts how they will act in the future. The team consisting of Sonalysts, Inc. and its subcontractors General Dynamics Applied Physical Sciences and Dive Technologies is uniquely qualified to develop this technology for operational and mission-related benefit. This Phase I project will start with a determination of how DTs can be implemented in UUVs and how to overcome the data transport difficulties inherent in undersea operations (including infrequent, low data rate, and low fidelity sensing of environment). The team will then conduct Knowledge Elicitation (KE) with Government, industry, and academia experts to write detailed UUV use cases that span the classes of Navy UUVs and across the UUV lifecycle (development, sustainment, and operations). DT implementations will be mapped to each use case, which will then be analyzed for Return on Investment (ROI). Using the ROI determination, the team will select two high value use cases to outline UUV DT system architectures that could be developed into prototypes in Phase II.