Contextual Observations for Natural Speech CharacterIzation On Unmanned Ships (CONSCIOUS)

While international standards of safe travel at sea provide for many vessel interactions, there are often occasions where vessel interactions, with human piloted vessels, are negotiated over VHF bridge to bridge communication. In order for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) to safely operate amongst other vessels, it is critical that USVs can understand what is transmitted over VHF radio and intelligently respond back. The Contextual Observations for Natural Speech CharacterIzation On Unmanned Ships (CONSCIOUS) system addresses this challenge by providing USVs a method to understand and appropriately respond to bridge to bridge radio communications. CONSCIOUS provides for all components of the processing pipeline, including Speech To Text (STT), intent classification, information extraction, and response generation to a separate vessel via Text To Speech (TTS). In the Phase II program, we refine the algorithms that we have demonstrated during the Phase I effort. The CONSCIOUS system will be developed in a modular method that be inserted into many different USV platforms.