A Graphical Mission Specification and Partitioning Tool for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles

Abstract

The use of Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) has been proposed for several different types of applications including hydrographic surveys (e.g., mapping the ocean floor and exploring sunken wreckage), mine detection and identification, law enforcement (e.g., enforcing certain fishing regulations), environmental and pollution monitoring, and even performing surveys to find potential drilling locations on the ocean floor for the oil industry. Recently the idea of using multiple, cooperating UUVs to execute these missions has also been proposed. There are two main factors that dictate a particular mission's success. The first factor regards creating a mission that is free from errors, both syntactically and semantically. The second factor deals with properly splitting a mission into a set of sub-missions and assigning each sub-mission to a group of UUVs. Even though tools have been developed to help reduce these potential problems such as high level mission programming languages, compilers for these languages, and utilities to automatically split a user specified mission, the potential still exists for errors when creating a mission (e.g. semantic errors introduced from programming and maintaining the code for existing missions). The goal of this paper is to present a programming-free, parallel mission generation utility that uses an existing graphical tool called Nobeltec. Our utility allows an operator to graphically specify a mission and the resulting set of parallel missions are displayed on screen. The main contribution of this tool is that it relieves the user from low- level mission programming, all the potential problems that come with it, and manual partitioning of the mission across the available UUVs. Thus, no matter what the application is, this tool is another step towards successfully creating missions for either for a single UUV or a group of UUVs.