Review of mission planning for autonomous marine vehicle fleets

Thompson, Fletcher; Guihen, Damien

doi:10.1002/rob.21819

Cited by 67 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 95 publications

(116 reference statements)

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“…And consequently it is common that mission plans for underwater operations are generated with the aid of automated planning algorithms adapted from the AI literature. For instance, a comprehensive survey of mission planning solutions used for autonomous marine vehicle fleets was done by Thompson and Guihen in [15]. In their work, they restricted the planning paradigms applicable to marine operations to the following four state-action planning methods:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Survey of Mission Planning and Management Architectures for Underwater Cooperative Robotics Operations

et al. 2020

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Almost every research project that focuses on the cooperation of autonomous robots for underwater operations designs their own architectures. As a result, most of these architectures are tightly coupled with the available robots/vehicles for their respective developments, and therefore the mission plan and management is done using an ad-hoc solution. Typically, this solution is tightly coupled to just one underwater autonomous vehicle (AUV), or a restricted set of them selected for the specific project. However, as the use of AUVs for underwater operations increases, there is the need to identify some commonalities and weaknesses of these architectures, specifically in relation to mission planning and management. In this paper, we review a selected number of architectures and frameworks that in one way or another make use of different approaches to mission planning and management. Most of the selected works were developed for underwater operations. Still, we have included some other architectures and frameworks from other domains that can be of interest for the survey. The explored works have been assessed using selected features related to mission planning and management, considering that underwater operations are performed in an uncertain and unreliable environment, and where unexpected events are not strange. Furthermore, we have identified and highlighted some potential challenges for the design and implementation of mission managers. This provides a reference point for the development of a mission manager component to be integrated in architectures for cooperative robotics in underwater operations, and it can serve for the same purposes in other domains of application.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Survey of Mission Planning and Management Architectures for Underwater Cooperative Robotics Operations

et al. 2020

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“…The use of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for marine interventions has attracted increasing interest in recent years from ocean scientists, marine industries and the military [1][2][3]. However, the use of this kind of robotic system for underwater operations faces a series of challenges that include: the power required to operate them, the constrained nature of underwater communications, the limited perception capabilities of the aforementioned systems, the lack of an underwater positioning system, and the reduced scope of existing underwater maps and the need for autonomous adaption to achieve a certain degree of delegation [1].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This latter delegation challenge has usually been tackled by defining a sequence of tasks assigned to an AUV, and known as a mission plan [4,5]. In the early uses of AUVs, the mission plan was typically created manually by human operators, being replaced recently by the use of deterministic planning algorithms [3]. The full mission plan is typically loaded into the AUVs to be launched, either from an onshore facility or a support vessel.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Proposal of an Automated Mission Manager for Cooperative Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Martínez¹,

Martínez-Ortega²,

Rodríguez‐Molina³

et al. 2020

Applied Sciences

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In recent years there has been an increasing interest in the use of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for ocean interventions. Typical operations imply the pre-loading of a pre-generated mission plan into the AUV before being launched. Once deployed, the AUV waits for a start command to begin the execution of the plan. An onboard mission manager is responsible for handling the events that may prevent the AUV from following the plan. This approach considers the management of the mission only at the vehicle level. However, the use of a mission-level manager in coordination with the onboard mission manager could improve the handling of exogenous events that cannot be handled fully at the vehicle level. Moreover, the use of vehicle virtualization by the mission-level manager can ease the use of older AUVs. In this paper, we propose a new mission-level manager to be run at a control station. The proposed mission manager, named Missions and Task Register and Reporter (MTRR), follows a decentralized hierarchical control pattern for self-adaptive systems, and provides a basic virtualization in regard to the AUV’s planning capabilities. The MTRR has been validated as part of the SWARMs European project. During the final trials we assessed its effectiveness and measured its performance. As a result, we have identified a strong correlation between the length of mission plan and the time required to start a mission ( ρ s = 0.79 , n = 45 , p 0.001 ). We have also identified a possible bottleneck when accessing the repositories for storing the information from the mission. Specifically, the average time for storing the received state vectors in the relational database represented only 18.50% of the average time required for doing so in the semantic repository.

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“…As a platform that can autonomously run in the ocean, lakes and rivers, USVs (Unmanned Surface Vehicles) can perform various civilian and military works, such as marine surveying and mapping, environmental monitoring, maritime search/rescue and military strikes [1][2][3]. Indeed, USVs have become popular in recent years, with researchers focusing on many related research areas, including collision avoidance [4][5][6], path planning [7,8] and navigation motion control [9,10], etc.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A COLREGs-Based Dynamic Navigation Safety Domain for Unmanned Surface Vehicles: A Case Study of Dolphin-I

Zhou

Wang

Zhang

2020

JMSE

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Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) are intelligent machines that have been widely studied in recent years. The safety of USVs’ activities is a priority issue in their applications; one effective method is to delimit an exclusive safety domain around the USV. Besides considering collision avoidance, the safety domain should satisfy the requirements of encounter situations in the COLREGs (International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea) as well. Whereas the model providing the safety domain for the USVs is defined through the experience of the manned ships, a specific model for USVs has been rarely studied. A dynamic navigation safety domain (DNSD) for USVs was proposed in this paper. To construct the model, the essential factors that could affect the navigation safety of the USVs were extracted via a rough set, and the extension functions of these factors were carried out. The DNSD was employed in various situations and compared with the ship domain models of common ships. It was found that the domain boundary can be automatically corrected according to the change in the working conditions when the DNSD is in use. Compared with the Fujii and Coldwell models, the DNSD can provide a larger safety area for a USV’s action of collision avoidance.

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Review of mission planning for autonomous marine vehicle fleets

Cited by 67 publications

References 95 publications

Survey of Mission Planning and Management Architectures for Underwater Cooperative Robotics Operations

Survey of Mission Planning and Management Architectures for Underwater Cooperative Robotics Operations

Proposal of an Automated Mission Manager for Cooperative Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

A COLREGs-Based Dynamic Navigation Safety Domain for Unmanned Surface Vehicles: A Case Study of Dolphin-I

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