Autonomous minehunting and mapping technologies program autonomous maneuvering capabilities

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) has sponsored the Autonomous Minehunting and Mapping Technologies (AMMT) Program to demonstrate undersea vehicle technologies critical to future Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (UUVs). The program goals include mine and obstacle detection and localization, imaging of underwater targets, near real-time long-range acoustic communications and an over-the-horizon approach to the region of interest. To support such goals, the vehicle control system has been significantly upgraded to provide autonomous adaptive mission planning. Prior DARPA UUV´s guidance and control system allowed an operator to specify a preplanned sequence of guidance commands to control the vehicle trajectory. While this capability was proven to be quite reliable and the control system has proven to be robust to vehicle changes, contingent vehicle maneuvers were limited to (1) automatic guidance command generation for survey search regions (lane azimuth contingent on ocean current direction) and (2) preplanned maneuvers based on host ship command. AMMT requires obstacle avoidance, terrain following, conditional target imaging, and optimal path planning in real-time as well as a simple high level specification of mission objectives and constraints. The AMMT/V on-line mission planning system attempts to achieve mission goals via real-time assessment and trajectory planning and interfaces to the existing UUV guidance and control system