Lockheed Martin Ferry Technologies (Perry) is currently demonstrating the employment of small inexpensive Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) for area reconnaissance and object relocation/classification in Shallow Water (SW) and Very Shallow Water (VSW) environments. An MIT Sea Grant Odyssey II AUV, equipped with side-scan sonar and automated on-vehicle sensor processing hardware and software is employed as an area reconnaissance platform, transmitting detection information to a second concurrently-operating inspection-capable. The conjunctive use of each platform's characteristics (speed and range for free-swimming vehicles and relative positioning-stationkeeping for hover-capable vehicles) optimizes search and evaluation of subsea objects. A unique facet of this Cooperating AW research addresses the employment of the vehicles in an unstructured navigation environment which does not employ any off-vehicle positioning aids(transponders or pingers) in the completion of search and the derivation of revisit coordinates. All navigation and positioning is vehicle based, employing a combination of Global Positioning System coordinates, inertial measurement, and Doppler measured velocity Using coordinates and classification information which may contribute to the classification solution which are derived and acoustically transmitted by the Odyssey search AUV, the CETUS intervention AUV dynamically derives and revises plans which optimize it's capability to revisit, localize, and classify targets. This program is intended to provides a base measurement of effectiveness using proven existing vehicles and capabilities, and the means to evaluate and demonstrate the advantages of cooperative sensing from multiple platforms for minimum time/maximum coverage of an area which support the goats of rapid area reconnaissance and evaluation, The ultimate goals of this program are to derive an rapidly deployable inexpensive autonomous reconnaissance and intervention capability for SW,VSW environments, supporting and possibly supplanting the use of ships or other manned assets for many dangerous, difficult or expensive SW/VSW water tasks.
