Goal reasoning for autonomous underwater vehicles: Responding to unexpected agents

We describe preliminary work toward applying a goal reasoning agent for controlling an underwater vehicle in a partially observable, dynamic environment. In initial at-sea tests, our investigation focuses on a notional scenario wherein an autonomous underwater vehicle pursuing a survey goal unexpectedly detects the presence of a potentially hostile surface vessel. Our tests suggest that Goal-Driven Autonomy, a model of goal reasoning, can successfully reason about this scenario using only the limited computational resources typically available on underwater robotic platforms.