A project to demonstrate autonomous obstacle avoidance

This paper presents the activities and plans of a 2 year program for developing intelligent controllers for autonomous underwater vehicles at Martin Marietta Aerospace Baltimore Division. The program consists of activities being conducted by Martin Marietta in Baltimore and activities funded by Martin Marietta at the Marine Systems Engineering Laboratory of the University of New Hampshire. Terrain following and obstacle avoidance has been tackle as a generic problem to focus the program on a specific function for pratical evaluation of the general concepts. The Martin Marietta activity consists of the development of an Intelligent Controller Design Facility, implementation and performance evaluation of various controllers using the design facility, and the selection, procurement, interface and signal processing for an obstacle avoidance sensor to be used on the MSEL vehicle EAVE-EAST during field trials. The MSEL activity involves designing and implementing an intelligent controller for EAVE-EAST, and performing field trials to demonstrate and evaluate the intelligent controller design.