The Role of adaptive mission planning and control in persistent autonomous underwater vehicles presence

Abstract

The Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) community has for many years recognized the potential benefits made by adapting mission planning on-the-fly. Over the years there has been some degree of success in applying adaptive mission planning to very specific problems. Examples of applications include capabilities for a vehicle to search for, and then modify its trajectory to follow, a feature such as a plume or a thermocline, or to modify its trajectory to avoid an obstacle, or to find and follow a feature such as a pipeline. Despite an evident increase in the number of applications, the use of adaptive mission planning is still in its infancy. There is no doubt that adaptive mission planning will play a pivotal role in future AUV persistent presence. So what is delaying this technology from making the leap towards wider industry acceptance? This paper reviews the literature in adaptive mission planning and uses a failure analysis technique to identify key obstacles for the integration of this technique in wider AUV applications. We use our failure analysis to help devise recommendations for mitigating these obstacles. The complexity of the mathematical approaches used by adaptive techniques is one key obstacle. Perhaps of more importance is that the AUV community is increasingly requiring quantitative assessment of risk associated with the use of AUVs. We propose that probability is the appropriate measure for quantifying the risk of adaptive systems and their uncertainty. The work here presented is a collective endeavor of the Engineering Committee on Oceanic Resources Specialist Panel on Underwater Vehicles.