Using collaborative Autonomous Vehicles in Mine Countermeasures

This article describes concepts evaluated at NATO Undersea Research Centre (NURC) recent experiment as the part of Autonomous Mine Countermeasures (MCM) Program. We investigated the possibility of reacquisition of the target with the Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV), the possibility of controlling the position of the ASV relative to the target location, and tested the concept of guiding a neutralization weapon to the target based on the contact location obtained from the hunting mission performed by an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). Second part of the article focuses on implementation in the open-source MOOS-IvP software framework. This framework allows for flexibility in control and mission planning. Guidance is covered by the MOOS-IvP implementation of the controller while the COTS autopilot handles low-level control. The control performance is verified in simulation and confirms arbitrarily small tracking error as well as tested in real, at-sea environment which included external disturbances, such as currents and waves. This experiment has shown that the collaborative use of autonomous systems has the potential to transform MCM capability, from a Cold War legacy focused on post-operations clearance with surface ships, to a quickly deployable system, autonomous system.