Physics – Geophysics
Scientific paper
Dec 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010agufm.p13b1368j&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010, abstract #P13B-1368
Physics
Geophysics
[0456] Biogeosciences / Life In Extreme Environments, [3080] Marine Geology And Geophysics / Submergence Instruments: Rov, Auv, Submersibles
Scientific paper
NASA’s Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets (ASTEP) program is a science-driven program to produce advances in scientific and technological capabilities for planetary exploration. Oceanographic robotic vehicles and planetary exploration robots have proven to be highly effective scientific tools for performing scientific research in remote, extreme, and hostile environments that preclude direct human presence. In both domains, the planets and the world’s oceans, human oversight of remote robotic exploration can dramatically enhance scientific return in comparison to purely pre-planned missions by combining the perception, intelligence, and domain knowledge of the human operators with the super-human physical and sensory capabilities of robots. The degree of human oversight, however, is restricted in sea and space by physical limits on the bandwidth and time delay of communications between human operators and remote robotic platforms. Enhanced robotic autonomy can alleviate this obstacle. We present a communications and control architecture for underwater oceanographic robot vehicles that has permitted us to introduce elements of enhanced autonomy into operations with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) Nereus and Sentry. Our architecture is designed to facilitate: (1) autonomous distillation of scientific data and transmission of salient synopses from the remote vehicle to its human operators; (2) high-level near real-time human supervision and control of mission programming; (3) semi-supervised learning of environmental models for enhanced survey and search mission effectiveness. Specific capabilities our group has demonstrated include selective data delivery via acoustic link; near real-time reprogramming of vehicle mission programs during otherwise preplanned dives; and validation of autonomous decision-making processes with human-supervision. These elements have been recently demonstrated during three deployments with these vehicles to the Santa Barbara Basin (Sentry, 2009), Cayman Trough (Nereus, 2009), and the Gulf of Mexico during the Deepwater Horizon disaster (Sentry, 2010). We discuss several lessons learned, particularly as they apply to the future development of human-supervised autonomy in subsea robotics and the implications for planetary robotics. Our results demonstrate that when initial environmental characterization is poor, limited human supervision can accelerate the study, and improve the analysis, of environmental phenomena in extreme remote environments.
Bowen A.
Camilli Richard
German Christopher R.
Jakuba Mike
Kinsey J. C.
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