Heterogeneous Autonomous Mobile Maritime Expeditionary Robots

For the ONR-funded Heterogeneous Adaptive Maritime Mobile Expeditionary Robots (HAMMER) project, we work on cooperative autonomy for a fleet of unmanned vehicles working together in the aerial, water surface, and underwater domains. Each of these systems work well independently, but our goal is to integrate their performance into one system of vehicles that can safely perform cooperative tasks. The challenges we are working on include creating reliable communications links between vehicles in the harsh low bandwidth maritime environment, integrating novel onboard sensors and inter-vehicle communication to create filters to estimate the state of the network, and creating autonomous takeoff-and-landing algorithms between the aerial/underwater vehicles and the surface "mothership" vehicle. The surface vehicle is envisioned to be capable of transporting the aerial and underwater vehicles as well as providing mission-lengthening power. Possible applications of this system include automated deployment and recovery of data-collecting unmanned underwater vehicles and an ad hoc wireless network where the aerial vehicle relays time-sensitive data collected from the surface or underwater vehicle to a human on a ship many miles away. In a separate but related project, we are also determining human-autonomy teaming required for future Naval programs, assessing the state-of-the-art algorithms, and creating open challenge problems to academia to fill gaps based on the Navy's need.