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Talk-12: The LAMSS Virtual Ocean: A Real-Time Testbed for Undersea Sensing, Communication, and Autonomy
Andrew Poulsen, Henrik Schmidt, and Toby Schneider
End-to-end evaluation of autonomous undersea sensing networks is difficult to complete entirely at sea because field trials, although essential, are costly, hard to repeat, and diagnostically limited. This presentation introduces the Laboratory for Autonomous Marine Sensing Systems (LAMSS) Virtual Ocean, a real-time, payload-facing testbed built around fielded front seat, sensor, and acoustic modem interfaces. By preserving these operational contracts, the Virtual Ocean lets the same payload stack, including autonomy, sensor processing, navigation, environmental modeling, and communication/networking, run without modification across virtual, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL), and at-sea configurations. The framework generates physics-based payload-facing signals in real time by coupling environmental, acoustic propagation, ambient-noise, target/source, and hydrodynamic models through a nested, multi-rate execution architecture. That architecture links slow environmental forcing and intermediate acoustic propagation to high-rate platform dynamics, array motion, and element-level sensor and acoustic modem signal generation, supporting a unified test continuum spanning synthetic exploration, data-driven reconstruction, HIL stimulation, and topside operational support. A representative closed-loop sea-trial reconstruction shows qualitative agreement with passive acoustic tracking behavior and bearing-time-record structure in a single system-level comparison, supporting algorithm development, integration testing, system analysis, and pre-deployment evaluation of undersea sensing networks.
Categories:
- Multi-Agent Decision-Making
- Adaptive Control