Seakeeping system trades for coordinated air-surface-underwater operations

Future autonomous marine missions will depend on the seamless coordination of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Applications will include autonomous refuelling, data transfer and periodic maintenance. A critical need is the capability to autonomously capture, retrieve and deploy a UUV from a USV platform. To aid in developing this new capability, we propose a performance specification to quantify the required compensation. The relative peak-to-peak vertical displacement (PVD) is a measure sea state induced vessel to vessel motion that must be regulated. Any successful autonomous capture and retrieval system will have to address this only the vertical motion for safe and secure capture, retrieval and deployment.