Coordinated Autonomy for Persistent Presence in Harbor and Riverine Environments

Abstract

In FY 2007 the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) teamed with Virginia Tech (VT) to conduct fundamental research and experimentation aimed at enabling coordinated autonomous operations by teams of heterogeneous (land, sea, air) vehicles. The primary goal of this research is to develop tools for vehicle-to-vehicle cueing and distributed sensing for shared situational awareness. A long-term goal for this research is persistent area surveillance of harbor and riverine environments by a “distributed autonomous system” (DAS) of networked vehicles and sensors. Under this operational concept, aerial vehicles would function as long-range sensors and provide navigational cues to surface vehicles providing close-up video inspection or interdiction of suspicious vessels. Sensor data analysis and integration would provide automated scene analysis, object detection and tracking, and vision-based autonomous navigation. The system would exploit data from all vehicles and sensors to produce three dimensional maps of the operating environment, buildings, ships, etc.