Sensing and Autonomy for Riverine Vessels

Abstract

The principal goal of this project is to develop the technology and algorithms that will enable an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) to operate fast and autonomously in unknown riverine environments, including tropical rivers. Robust autonomy requires that the USV senses the surface and subsurface environments, discriminates waterways that are navigable from those that are not, identifies stationary and moving obstacles, including other vessels, and then optimally plans and re-plan a route in realtime. Since speed is a vessel s principal defense, all of these tasks must be done as efficiently as possible to ensure successful operation at the greatest possible speed. This project is tightly coordinated with collaborators at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) whose work is conducted under a related project. All of the work reported herein was jointly developed with our NPS collaborators.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 30, 2012
Accession Number
ADA573129

Entities

People

  • Craig A Woolsey
  • Daniel J. Stilwell

Organizations

  • Virginia Tech

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy
  • Ground and Sea Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Algorithms
  • Autonomous Surface Vehicles
  • Autonomy
  • Best Practices
  • Control Systems
  • Engineering
  • Environment
  • Experimental Data
  • Guidance
  • Information Operations
  • Motion Planning
  • Signal Processing
  • Trajectories
  • Unmanned
  • Unmanned Surface Vehicles
  • Vehicles

Readers

  • Coastal and Marine Engineering/Sediment Transport/Hydraulic Engineering
  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Robotics and Automation.

Technology Areas

  • Autonomy