Automatic MCM mission control for AUV systems

Future AUV products must have a real autonomy, that is, they must be able to navigate and fulfill a MCM surveillance mission with high reliability without any operator control. The first step toward this product is a vehicle programmed on a defined trajectory, that records data and reports to the sonar operator when coming back to the recovery point. This step is currently under development. The second step is giving the AUV more autonomy for analysis and decision, to allow it to replan its trajectory in order to best fulfill its MCM mission. A series of tools are useful to both steps and constitute the mission control module. Among them, processes of concurrent navigation and mapping, bottom characterization, mission analysis and re-planning strategy are developed to build the mission control module, whose task can be summed up as answering two questions: 1) what performance level the surveillance task has been fulfilled with; 2) how to behave in order to raise that performance level above a minimum threshold.