Autonomous Assets Research Articles

Collaboration of Heterogeneous Marine Robots Toward Multidomain Sensing and Situational Awareness on Partially Submerged Targets

This article reports on a multirobot system that collaboratively obtains above-water, surface, and below-water information on a floating target. This capability allows a ship to autonomously survey and obtain situational awareness on a floating unresponsive target from a safe stand-off before inspecting it more closely or navigating around it. The target could be another ship, structure, or a navigational obstruction like an iceberg. The proposed solution is a collaborative system with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV), and an unmanned surface vehicle (USV). The UAV captures visual imagery to create a 3-D model of the target’s above-water geometry using photogrammetry. The UUV surveys the target’s submerged hull with integrated imaging and profiling bathymetric sonars. The USV hosts an intelligent mission-planning node which manages the robotic collaboration in a centralized architecture by autonomously planning and distributing the missions for the UUV and UAV. The intelligent node also adaptively plans the USV’s trajectory to support the other autonomous assets, specifically reducing and bounding the UUV’s state-estimate error through collaborative localization. The resulting above- and below-water sensor data is fused at the waterplane, using a sliding correlation algorithm, to yield a 3-D representation of the floating unresponsive target. The contributions from this article include the cross-domain robotic collaboration and autonomous mission-planning toward acquiring and fusing data from heterogeneous robots. The autonomous mission-planning and data-merging algorithms are presented. The setup and results from simulations and in-water testing with an UUV, USV, and UAV are described.

A resiliency analysis of information distribution policies over mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have been widely used for information distribution tasks. The radio communication channels that are established dynamically between the different terminals of these networks, like wireless sensors, ground vehicles, and autonomous assets (e.g. UAVs), allow for a flexible and efficient information distribution process. However, given the dynamic topology and limited bandwidth of MANETs, the performance of such systems is often limited by their resiliency against connection interruptions caused by different actors, such as adverse weather conditions, random component breakdowns, physical barriers, and adversarial attacks. Whenever this type of connection interruption occur, the MANET losses its ability to distribute the information efficiently, causing delays that often reduce the value of the information being sent over the network. In this paper, we are interested in analyzing the performance of this type of networks in the presence of such interruptions. To this end, we first transform the information distribution process into a flow problem over a time-expanded directed acyclic graph, setting as the objective function the maximization of the time-discounted value of the distributed data. To analyze the resiliency of the resulting information distribution plans, we take the stance of an adversary and apply network interdiction techniques to estimate the worst possible deterioration that could be inflicted by targeting some connections of the MANET. The interdiction scheme we introduce can be adapted to model various situations and contexts. Finally, we test our framework on instances of different sizes and analyze some interesting properties observed in the experiments.

Performances of Some Autonomous Assets in Maritime Missions

Performances of Some Autonomous Assets in Maritime Missions

Why autonomous assets are good for reliability – the impact of ‘operator-related component’ failures on heavy mobile equipment reliability

This study examines the maintenance records for components necessary for the comfort and safety of the operators of heavy mobile equipment. The results show that air conditioners, ladders, driver’s seats and mirrors and other required operator-related components can have a significant impact on an asset’s reliability. Analysis was conducted on 10 years of work orders for five identical 1400HP shovels and three identical 1470HP shovels. The results suggest that removing operator-related components contribute to a 15% decrease in the number of work orders and an 8% increase in reliability. In an autonomous asset these components would not be required. The key to this analysis is a rule-based expert system used to clean more than ten thousand work orders and allocate events to specific sub-systems with associated failure modes. While the mining industry has moved to autonomous haul trucks and drills, there are as yet no autonomous shovels. For manufacturers looking at the business case for these units, the availability of data on the reliability increase from removing the operator-related components will be valuable information.

Infrastructures protection based on heterogeneous networks

This paper presents a modelling approach for mapping cyber defence issues with respect to heterogeneous networks; the research is devoted to develop an agent-driven simulation environment able to analyse this problem considering different layers including CIS capabilities, operational issues, system architecture, management processes and human factors. The paper analyses a specific case study to validate and verify the proposed modelling approach; the scenario is focused on a heterogeneous network applied to an extended maritime environment including autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV), sensors, platforms, vessels, satellites and relevant military assets and threats. The present document uses this case study as example of system of systems to be simulated including cyber warfare issues to evaluate their impact on operations.

Capturing Performance in Cyber Human Supervisory Control

Modern cyber operations require operators to maintain supervisory control of remote computer agents. A current operational concern is the number of agents an operator can control at once. This type of task resonates with similar Human Supervisory Control (HSC) research that has been conducted in environments such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicle operations. Within the relevant literature, there has been limited discussion of cyber-HSC, and no available experimental research. In this paper, we present an initial exploration cyber-HSC. Using the BOARD 1.5 Simulation, we manipulated the number of autonomous assets accessible to a human operator. We expected that as the number of autonomous agents available increased, we would observe concomitant changes in human performance and cognition.However, our results indicated that participants’ overall span-of-control did not vary with additional agents. Our findings highlight the need for continued research on issues of supervisory control within cyber operations.

Maintainer of the Future

In the last two decades we have seen significant changes in how assets are operated and in the duties of operators due to advances in process control, remote operations systems and development of autonomous assets. However the day to day work of maintenance technicians engaged in the resources and infrastructure sectors has changed very little. This paper looks at trends in asset management particularly with respect to assets in remote locations and how these trends might affect the role and competences of our maintainers of the future.

Maintainer of the future

In the last two decades we have seen significant changes in how assets are operated and in the duties of operators due to advances in process control, remote operations systems and development of autonomous assets. However the day to day work of maintenance technicians engaged in the resources and infrastructure sectors has changed very little. This paper looks at trends in asset management particularly with respect to assets in remote locations and how these trends might affect the role and competences of our maintainers of the future.

Confluence of navigation, communication, and control in distributed spacecraft systems

This research details the development of technologies and methodologies that enable distributed spacecraft systems by supporting integrated navigation, communication, and control. Operating at the confluence of these critical functions produces capabilities needed to realize the promise of distributed spacecraft systems, including improved performance and robustness relative to monolithic space systems. Navigation supports science data association and data alignment for distributed aperture sensing, multipoint observation, and co-observation of target regions. Communication enables autonomous distributed science data processing and information exchange among space assets. Both navigation and communication provide essential input to control methods for coordinating distributed autonomous assets at the interspacecraft system level and the intraspacecraft affector subsystem level. A technology solution to implement these capabilities, the Crosslink Transceiver, is also described. The Crosslink Transceiver provides navigation and communication capability that can be integrated into a developing autonomous command and control methodology for distributed spacecraft systems. A small satellite implementation of the Crosslink Transceiver design is detailed and its ability to support broad distributed spacecraft mission classes is described.