You are here

FreeSwim: Autonomous Behaviors for Undersea Sensors

Award Information
Agency: Department of Defense
Branch: Navy
Contract: N00014-10-M-0285
Agency Tracking Number: N10A-038-0572
Amount: $69,942.00
Phase: Phase I
Program: STTR
Solicitation Topic Code: N10A-T038
Solicitation Number: 2010.A
Timeline
Solicitation Year: 2010
Award Year: 2010
Award Start Date (Proposal Award Date): 2010-06-28
Award End Date (Contract End Date): 2011-04-30
Small Business Information
625 Mount Auburn Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States
DUNS: 115243701
HUBZone Owned: No
Woman Owned: No
Socially and Economically Disadvantaged: No
Principal Investigator
 Marc Richards
 Scientist
 (617) 491-3474
 mrichards@cra.com
Business Contact
 Ninos Hanna
Title: Contract Specialist
Phone: (617) 491-3474
Email: nhanna@cra.com
Research Institution
 Boston University
 David Bowen
 
Office of Sponsored Programs 25 Buick Street
Boston, MA 2215
United States

 (617) 353-4365
 Nonprofit College or University
Abstract

Future naval operations are expected to make extensive use of unmanned vehicles to support a range of operations, including intelligence gathering, mine warfare, force protection, and anti-submarine warfare. Current unmanned systems are typically controlled remotely by an operator who directly manipulates a control interface for the vehicle. The effectiveness of this approach is obviously limited in situations where high latency, low bandwidth, or frequently dropped connections will be experienced. Additionally, many autonomous control approaches that have shown promise in laboratory and experimental settings lack a rigorous formulation of behavior validation that is required to evaluate operational success. Our proposed effort, dubbed “FreeSwim”, addresses these challenges. FreeSwim enables intelligent autonomous behavior execution for unmanned subsurface vehicles by supporting remotely specified high-level mission control directives that are interpreted and executed by the unmanned vehicle depending on the constraints of the local dynamic environment. Behavior execution is validated relative to mission directive expectations by capturing and analyzing measures of performance and effectiveness. FreeSwim’s intelligent bandwidth utilization is designed for use in environments where remote human operation of the vehicle is unfeasible due to limited or unreliable communication capabilities.

* Information listed above is at the time of submission. *

US Flag An Official Website of the United States Government