REP10 AUV: Shallow water operations with heterogeneous autonomous vehicles

The REP10 AUV experiment, which took place in Portugal, is described together with the lessons learned with this deployment. The REP10 AUV experiment was organized by the Portuguese Navy in cooperation with the Naval Undersea Warfare Center - Newport (US), Porto University (PO), the Naval Research Laboratory (US) and the NATO Undersea Research Centre (IT). The experiment was focused on the demonstration of heterogeneous autonomous vehicles in mine-warfare and Rapid Environmental Assessment missions. Nine autonomous submarines of 4 different types (Gavia, Iver2, LAUV SeaCon and Isurus) were deployed together with the autonomous catamaran Swordfish from the Bacamarte ship from the Portuguese Navy. Spatial and temporal segregation principles simplified the deployment of multiple vehicles from different institutions. Inter-operated wireless and acoustic networks were used to demonstrate the feasibility of real-time task re-planning and situational awareness. The surface autonomous vehicle proved key to the deployment of additional sonars and communication gateways. Remote servers were used for data assimilation and forecasting for daily planning.