Abstract

The use of Unmanned Underwater Vehicles(UUVs) has been proposed for several different types ofapplications including hydrographic surveys (e.g., mappingthe ocean floor and exploring sunken wreckage), minedetection and identification, law enforcement (e.g., enforcingcertain fishing regulations), environmental and pollutionmonitoring, and even performing surveys to find potentialdrilling locations on the ocean floor for the oil industry.Recently the idea of using multiple, cooperating UUVs toexecute these missions has also been proposed. There aretwo main factors that dictate a particular mission’s success.The first factor regards creating a mission that is free fromerrors, in terms of both syntax and semantics. The secondfactor deals with properly splitting a mission into a set ofsub-missions and assigning each sub-mission to a group ofUUVs. Even though tools have been developed to helpreduce these potential problems such as high level missionprogramming languages, compilers for these languages andutilities to automatically split an operator specified mission,the potential still exists for errors when creating a mission(e.g. semantic errors introduced from programming andmaintaining the code for existing missions). The goal of thisarticle is to present a programming-free, parallel missiongeneration utility that uses a series of tools we developedalong with a commercially available graphical package. Ourutility allows an operator to graphically specify a missionfor a group of UUVs and automatically split the missionamong the group based on an objective provided by theoperator. The main contribution of this tool is twofold. First,it relieves the operator from low-level mission programmingincluding the manual partitioning of the mission across agroup of available UUVs. Second, it allows the operator toreview the resulting set of generated sub-missions using thegraphical interface. Thus, no matter what the particularUUV application is, this tool is another step towardssuccessfully creating missions for UUVs.