A Behavior-Based Architecture for Realistic Autonomous Ship Control

Game environments provide a good domain for serious simulations such as those used in training navy conning officers. Currently, a typical training scenario requires multiple personnel to play each of the boats and thus is expensive. We propose an approach to addressing this issue by developing intelligent, autonomous controllers for each boat. Significant challenges toward achieving these goals are the realism of behavior exhibited by the automated boats and their realtime response to change. In this paper we describe a control architecture that enables the real-time response of boats and the repertoire of realistic behaviors we developed for this application. We demonstrate the capabilities of our system with experimental results