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Talk-16: Topside MOOS Utilities to Increase AUV Operator Efficiency

Ian Katz, MIT Sea Grant

Although significant and remarkable progress has been made toward vehicle autonomy, relatively little attention has been paid to the practical problems of operating a vehicle in the field. Put simply, most AUV software development focuses on optimally running a single mission, not on planning and running dozens of missions over the course of a day. In the case of AUVs, ship time is expensive. Furthermore, time spent collecting data (on a dive) directly competes with time spent analyzing data (on the surface). MIT Sea Grant has developed a suite of "topside" tools, designed to minimize the AUV's surface time -- making more (relevant) data available to the operator more quickly. These tools include DiveOfficer, which verbally announces vehicle state, Dashboard, a web-based log, chart, and KML server, and AUV PlanIt, an interactive position tracker and mission planner based in Google Earth. In addition to aiding the team of AUV operators, this software is easily understood by the ship captain and crew; providing this common language for AUV and ship position enables better coordination of AUV and ship movements during operation and recovery.

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Categories:

  • Mission Monitoring
  • Mission Planning
  • UUVs
  • Academia