Project description
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) make complex decisions about their navigation, based on the information they receive from the underwater environment, including potential hazards and unexpected events. These decisions may force the AUV to deviate from its pre-planned mission and generate a new mission plan. At the same time, human operators need to monitor the AUVs and understand the reasons for their behaviour and decisions. The amount of data collected by the AUVs is too large for all of it to be continually transmitted to an operator in real-time. Moreover, underwater communications is very low bandwidth (< 2Kbps) as only acoustic communications can be used for long distance messaging (>50m up to several kms). Any messages transmitted therefore need to be short to allow multiple vehicles to share the same acoustic communication medium. Hence, there is a need for a real-time system that can assist the operator by answering specific targeted queries about the behaviour of the AUV as succinctly as possible. These queries will be resolved by communicating with the AUV only in response to an operator query, and obtaining only the data that is necessary to resolve the query.
Assumed knowledge
Strong computer programming skills
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