NRI: Collaborative Research: Enabling Risk-Aware Decision Making in Human-Guided Unmanned Surface Vehicle Teams

在过去的十年中，小型低成本无人水面航行器（USV）的发展取得了重大进展。在许多民用应用中，部署由几个小型USV和一个或多个人类监督员组成的人机团队可以显着降低成本，提高安全性并提高运营效率。代表性的应用包括远程/持续海洋传感、海上搜索和救援、拥挤港口环境中的海上作业以及工业海上供应和支持。USV面临着室内操作机器人所没有经历过的独特挑战，例如：需要遵守海洋导航规则（COLREG）;当地的水流，波浪和风力条件可能严重降低传感器和执行器的动态范围;频繁的通信中断;以及由于室外水上操作期间情况迅速变化而带来的风险和紧迫性。这项研究旨在为人类和USV团队执行复杂的协作任务奠定决策基础。从监管和实践的角度来看，这一领域的进展对于未来USV系统的部署至关重要。这项研究的结果将通过降低民用应用中的部署成本和运营风险来发挥USV的巨大潜力。研究与研究生和本科生课程的整合将加强机器人和海洋工程课程，丰富参与学生的学习经验。外联活动将教育和告知K-12学生有关海洋机器人的职业机会。 拟议工作的总体目标是在风险知情决策方面取得进展，以便USV和人类主管团队可以在各种任务中合作。拟议的工作将通过利用任务协调和分配、规划、反应行为和控制方面的最新进展，开发一种全面的分布式决策方法，以实现在民用应用中部署人工引导的USV团队。将努力在这些组成部分方面取得进展，以确保它们相互一致，并明确说明决策过程中的风险。这项研究将开发方法来模拟团队任务，以确保决策的所有阶段都有必要的信息来做出明智的决定。将开发决策方法，用于对USV团队进行稀疏咨询控制，以降低风险，并协调和向团队中不同的USV分配任务。还将开发算法，用于风险感知的审慎轨迹规划，以及生成和执行反应行为，以减轻风险。所开发的方法将通过水上现场实验进行验证。

Over the last ten years, substantial progress has been made in the development of small low-cost unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). There are a number of civilian applications where deploying a human-robot team consisting of several small USVs and one or more human supervisors can significantly reduce costs, improve safety, and increase operational efficiencies. Representative applications include remote/persistent ocean sensing, marine search and rescue, maritime operations in congested port environments, and industrial offshore supply and support. USVs face unique challenges that are not experienced by robots operating indoors, such as: the need to adhere to marine navigation rules (COLREGs); local current, wave and wind conditions that can severely reduce the dynamic range of sensors and actuators; frequent communication interruptions; and risk and urgency due to rapidly changing situations during outdoor on-water operations. This research aims to develop decision making foundations for enabling teams of humans and USVs to perform complex collaborative tasks. Advances in this area could be extremely important from both a regulatory and practical standpoint for the future deployment of USV systems. Results from this research will enable leveraging the tremendous potential of USVs by reducing the cost of deployment and operational risks in civilian applications. The integration of the research with graduate and undergraduate courses will enhance the robotics and ocean engineering curricula and enrich learning experiences of the participating students. Outreach activities will educate and inform K-12 students about career opportunities in marine robotics. The overall goal of the proposed effort is to make advances in risk-informed decision making so that teams of USVs and human supervisors can work cooperatively on a wide variety of missions. The proposed work will develop a comprehensive distributed decision making approach by leveraging the latest advances in task coordination and assignment, planning, reactive behaviors, and control to enable the deployment of human-guided USV teams in civilian applications. Progress in these constituent components will be pursued to ensure that they are consistent with each other and to explicitly account for risk during decision making. This research will develop methodologies to model team missions to ensure that all phases of decision making will have the required information for making informed decisions. Decision making methodologies will be developed for sparse advisory control of USV teams to mitigate risks and for coordinating and assigning tasks to different USVs in the team. Algorithms will also be developed for risk-aware deliberative trajectory planning and generating and executing reactive behaviors for mitigating risks. The methods developed will be validated through on-water field experiments.