S&AS: INT: Taskable and Adaptable Autonomy for Heterogeneous Marine Vehicles

使用无人驾驶机器人潜水器的水下探索为了解世界海洋开辟了广阔的新领域。 然而，在目前的实践状态下，人类操作员必须为车辆提供特定的路点，这既耗时又不灵活。 该项目将开发自主能力，促进车载智能，从而延长无人水下和水面（水上）车辆的部署时间。 具体而言，该项目将实现自主信息收集任务，例如搜索感兴趣的区域和跟踪感兴趣的目标（例如，海洋中的生物热点）。 随着自主能力在该项目过程中的提高，人类必须致力于与车辆互动或纠正车辆行动的时间将减少，从而大大提高效率并降低海洋数据收集的成本。最终目标是开发智能自主能力，扩展无人海洋系统的功能，减少对人为干预和控制的需求。这一目标将通过关注船舶自主的三个关键领域来实现：（1）人类以自主系统可以理解的方式为车辆提供高水平，可执行任务的规范的能力;（2）自主车辆的认知能力，以提供智能的原位适应长期任务中不断变化的条件;以及（3）反射和内省故障恢复，允许飞行器自我评估故障并适当地响应它们，同时仍然满足使命规范。拟议的技术将通过两次海洋部署进行验证，包括多个水下滑翔机和自主水面车辆，以及使用卫星数据和现场部署数据进行的广泛模拟测试。

Underwater exploration using unmanned robotic vehicles has opened up vast new areas for understanding the world's oceans. However, in the current state of practice, human operators must provide specific waypoints for the vehicles to follow, which is both time-consuming and inflexible. This project will develop autonomy capabilities that facilitate on-vehicle intelligence, leading to longer duration deployments of unmanned underwater and surface (on-water) vehicles. Specifically, the project will enable autonomous information gathering missions, such as searching for an area of interest and tracking targets of interest (e.g., biological hot spots in the ocean). As the autonomous capabilities improve over the course of this project, the amount of time that humans must dedicate to interacting with, or correcting, the vehicle's actions will be reduced, drastically improving the efficiency and reducing the cost of ocean data collection. The ultimate objective is to develop intelligent autonomy capabilities that expand the functionality of unmanned marine systems and reduce the need for human intervention and control. This goal will be achieved by focusing on three key areas of marine vehicle autonomy: (1) the ability for humans to provide high-level, taskable specifications to vehicles in a way that is understandable to the autonomy system; (2) cognitive capabilities of autonomous vehicles to provide intelligent in-situ adaptation with changing conditions in long-duration missions; and (3) reflective and introspective failure recovery allowing the vehicles to self-assess faults and respond to them appropriately while still meeting the mission specifications. The proposed techniques will be validated through two ocean deployments, consisting of multiple underwater gliders and autonomous surface vehicles, as well as extensive simulated testing using satellite data and data from field deployments.