SBIR-STTR Award

TSI proposes to develop a mission planner that will be adaptable to AUVs currently planned to be integrated into the fleet over the next 3 years, be able to receive environmental data from Navy libraries (such as DIOPS), and optimize AUV missions as a result of the environmental data received. The mission planner will be able to coordinate the use of multiple AUVs to optimize environmental data collection and provide this information back to the Navy's data collection point

The Modular Mission Planning Toolkit (MMPT) will support multiple autonomous undersea vehicles (AUVs), multiple environmental databases, and multiple warfare scenarios. The toolkit provides a plug-in modular framework to facilitate the creation of planning mission scenarios and will be able to support environmental condition display, asset availability and condition tracking, route planning, multiple vehicle cooperation, marine mammal operation support, undersea communications system planning, or mission de-conflicting between heterogeneous vehicles. Using a shared database for information, mission plans, and vehicle parameters, multiple plug-ins can access the same data. The time slider component of the GUI allows the user to adjust time into the past or the future. This allows one to view historical mission data and preview future mission plans. The capabilities created during the Phase I project have greatly improved the process of planning an AUV mission. By seeing the effect of the forecasted environmental data on the mission plan, a user can visually see the predicted AUV track. This has greatly reduced the time, effort, error, and improved the reliability of common AUV planning. The results of this project will have applications not only in the Department of Defense mission planning, but in the research and commercial world as well.

Benefits:
The Modular Mission Planning Toolkit will have broad applications across all users of Autonomous Undersea Vehicles (AUVs). As AUVs become prevalent, it will be imperative that missions be planned with the best environmental data available. Additional concerns are the coordination of multiple AUVs, and the retrieval of environmental data from deployed AUVs back into environmental models. Finally, the AUV user community is growing to include NOAA, NSF, and NASA. The flexible nature of the MMPT design addresses all these concerns. This project will provide our nation significantly improved mission planning capabilities for unmanned systems. Phase I has proven the technical feasibility and operational desirability of the MMPT approach. Phase III success will expand to include all unmanned domains: Air, Surface, and Undersea.

Keywords:
Auv, Mission Planner, Modular Mission Planning Toolkit, Multiple Cooperating Auvs, Diops, Unmanned, Jaus, Marine Environment Model