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This paper explores the use of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) equipped with sensors to construct water quality models to aid in the assessment of important environmental hazards, for instance related to point-source pollutants or localized hypoxic regions. Our focus is on problems requiring the autonomous discovery and dense sampling of critical areas of interest in real-time, for which standard (e.g., grid-based) strategies are not practical due to AUV power and computing constraints that limit mission duration. To this end, we consider adaptive sampling strategies on Gaussian process (GP) stochastic models of the measured scalar field to focus sampling on the most promising and informative regions.

This paper introduces the game of reconnaissance blind multi-chess (RBMC) as a paradigm and test bed for understanding and experimenting with autonomous decision making under uncertainty and in particular managing a network of heterogeneous Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) sensors to maintain situational awareness informing tactical and strategic decision making. The intent is for RBMC to serve as a common reference or challenge problem in fusion and resource management of heterogeneous sensor ensembles across diverse mission areas. We have defined a basic rule set and a framework for creating more complex versions, developed a web-based software realization to serve as an experimentation platform, and developed some initial machine intelligence approaches to playing it.

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