Research Summaries

Back Optimal Mission Planning for MCM Vehicles and Sensors

Fiscal Year 2018
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department Naval Research Program
Investigator(s) Kaminer, Isaac I.
Kragelund, Sean P.
Walton, Claire L.
Sponsor NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary Mine countermeasures (MCM) is an extremely challenging and complex Navy mission, driven largely by the wide variety of potential threats and operational environments MCM forces may encounter. Mine hunting requires a number of different capabilities and techniques to address these challenges. Today, unmanned vehicles and advanced sensor systems play an integral role in many missions. Therefore it is imperative that MCM commanders and vehicle operators have the ability to maximize the efficiency and utility of these valuable resources.
The objective of this research is to develop MCM planning algorithms which optimize sensor performance for a team of heterogeneous vehicles conducting mine detection and identification missions. This project will leverage recent theoretical and computational advances by NPS faculty which have made it possible to solve optimal search problems with realistic sensor models and nonlinear vehicle dynamics. Generalized optimal control (GenOC) is a model-based framework for solving optimal control problems with parameter uncertainty. This framework can accommodate a wide variety of vehicle, sensor, and target models to produce search trajectories which outperform traditional area survey patterns under time or resource constraints. This capability also facilitates the rapid comparison of different vehicle, sensor, and teaming configurations to identify system attributes that perform best in a given MCM scenario.
This project will employ the GenOC framework by first incorporating environmental effects on vehicle and sonar performance. Second, we will investigate ways to model mine detection by the quality of collected sonar imagery vs. physics-based signal excess alone. A potential benefit of this effort is a reduction in the amount of unwanted or unusable sonar imagery collected during a sensing mission, since post-mission analysis of this data by human operators is one of the bottlenecks in the MCM operational timeline.
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Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal