User guide for MINTACS SeeTrack Exchange (MINSTE)
Abstract
The Royal Australian Navy (RAN) currently uses the Mine Warfare Tactical Command Software (MINTACS) Release 12 for Mine Countermeasures (MCM) mission planning and assessment. Recent MCM exercises are investigating the deployment of underwater unmanned vehicles (UUV) for route surveys. The route survey process has a post-processing stage in which the unmanned system's side scan sonar records are reviewed for contacts of interest. SeeTrack is one software application currently used for this post-processing stage. SeeTrack is a "generic" UUV mission planning and battle space visualization tool that acts as a viewer and software analysis tool for side scan sonar imagery. Mine-like contacts detected during post-mission analysis conducted with SeeTrack or similar applications can be imported into MINTACS for force-level mission assessments and battle-space visualization. However, the current release of MINTACS only allows manual entry of contact data by the operator, much of which must first be converted into compatible dimensional units, chart datum and date/time formats. This tedious, time-consuming process is prone to error, and can ultimately prove unworkable in light of current concepts of operation for unmanned systems, which dictate the reporting of all suspicious contacts. In previous exercises, these reports were known to be in the hundreds. Clearly, in this circumstance, operator overheads can be substantially reduced by automating some aspects of contact reporting. The software program MINTACS SeeTrack Exchange (MINSTE) was developed as a concept demonstrator to test and evaluate requirements for automation of data exchange between MCM mission planners. MINSTE is designed to transfer contact data from SeeTrack to MINTACS in a sequence of three steps. This report is the operator's guide for MINSTE. The guide provides detailed descriptions of all the features of MINSTE, including description of how the data are used within MINTACS once they have been imported.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Apr 01, 2009
- Accession Number
- ADA512060
Entities
People
- Alison Irwin
Organizations
- Defence Science and Technology Group