FreeSwim: Autonomous Behaviors for Undersea Sensors Navy STTR FY2010.A Sol No.: Navy STTR FY2010.A Topic No.: N10A-T038 Topic Title: FreeSwim: Autonomous Behaviors for Undersea Sensors Proposal No.: N10A-038-0572 Firm: Charles River Analytics Inc. 625 Mount Auburn Street Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138-4555 Contact: Marc Richards Phone: (617) 491-3474 Web Site: www.cra.com Abstract: Future naval operations are expected to make extensive use of unmanned vehicles to support a range of operations, including intelligence gathering, mine warfare, force protection, and anti-submarine warfare. Current unmanned systems are typically controlled remotely by an operator who directly manipulates a control interface for the vehicle. The effectiveness of this approach is obviously limited in situations where high latency, low bandwidth, or frequently dropped connections will be experienced. Additionally, many autonomous control approaches that have shown promise in laboratory and experimental settings lack a rigorous formulation of behavior validation that is required to evaluate operational success. Our proposed effort, dubbed "FreeSwim", addresses these challenges. FreeSwim enables intelligent autonomous behavior execution for unmanned subsurface vehicles by supporting remotely specified high-level mission control directives that are interpreted and executed by the unmanned vehicle depending on the constraints of the local dynamic environment. Behavior execution is validated relative to mission directive expectations by capturing and analyzing measures of performance and effectiveness. FreeSwim's intelligent bandwidth utilization is designed for use in environments where remote human operation of the vehicle is unfeasible due to limited or unreliable communication capabilities. Benefits: FreeSwim will have an immediate and tangible benefit for any military operation involving unmanned vehicles, with an emphasis on subsurface vehicles, and so will be of interest to the manufacturers of those systems, including vehicles, payloads, and the control systems. The benefits of unmanned vehicle control also apply to other government agency applications, such as security, surveillance, and disaster relief applications with the Departments of Homeland Security and Energy, as well as the Coast Guard. Further benefits to industry include autonomous robotic applications in the agricultural and mining sectors. Return