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ACT Autonomous Surface Vehicle Workshop Report
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“Self-awareness”, “Operations” and “Sensor” autonomy. The Self-awareness category
involves levels of autonomy dealing with the vessel’s ability to monitor and possibly
react to its own physical state (position, orientation, speed, and temperature), fuel (or
battery) levels and control systems. The Operations category involves the vessel’s
ability to be piloted remotely or conduct a mission without operator interaction,
whether as a sequential list of objectives or as behavioral routines that are followed
under various circumstances. The Operations category at the highest levels of autonomy
involves long-term planning, perhaps solving “Traveling Salesman” type problems in
which many competing objectives are considered. Finally, the Sensor category involves
the ability to operate and manage payload sensors, turning them on and off, logging
their data, configuring them from fixed mission plans or within a mission in response to
changing circumstances or environments.
Level 1: Remote piloting (manual)
Self-awareness: Position, orientation, speed and possibly rudimentary knowledge of
subsystem states (battery voltage/fuel level, rudder position, and thrust level) is
telemetered to the operator in real time for display and immediate situational
awareness only, with no requirement for logging of data.
Operations: Remote piloting of a vessel is the act of manually controlling thrust and
rudder movements through a telemetry link to the vessel. It involves no autonomous
behavior.
Sensor: Remote piloting of a sensor is operating the sensor manually for both
configuration and logging of data, either prior to mission execution or interactively via
remote telemetry link. It involves no autonomous behavior.
Level 2: Basic Autonomy (do as you’re told)
Self-awareness: Basic Autonomy involves the ability to sense, time stamp and log
internally the basic vessel condition including position, orientation, speed, fuel status
(whether battery voltage, watt-hours consumed or fuel tank level) and may include
internal temperatures, humidity level, leak detection and power consumed by various
payloads. Basic Autonomy is distinguished from Remote Piloting in that parameters are
time stamped and logged to provide a history of operations that may be scrutinized for
forensic and engineering analysis to improve operations and understand casualties.
Basic Autonomy also involves the ability to generate faults and alarms to the operator
based on sensed parameters and fixed alarm set points. These may include leak
detections, over-heating, low fuel levels or over speed warnings.
Operations: Basic Autonomy involves the ability to follow a pre-planned fixed mission
consisting of a sequential list of waypoints, lines, loiter points and combinations of these
without operator interaction. With some exceptions the only inputs are the vessel’s
position and heading (from onboard sensors) and the desired point to reach. Generally,
the only outputs are thrust and control surface (rudder) angles.
Sensor: Basic Autonomy involves the ability to turn a sensor on or off at specified times
during a mission to manage power, acoustic bandwidth etc. and to start and stop