High Bandwidth Communications for VSWMCM Operations

The goal of this research and experimentation is to utilize high bandwidth wireless communications to enable and improve collaborative autonomous operations in very shallow water (VSW) environments. Teams of autonomous vehicles can be deployed simultaneously to conduct wide-area surveillance and reconnaissance during Mine Countermeasures (MCM) or Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) operations. While these vehicles can quickly and efficiently collect vast amounts of data, they must be able to transfer the data to a command ship so it can be assimilated into actionable information for decision makers. High bandwidth data links are required to ensure timely distribution of the sheer volume of data being collected. This is critical for rapid operational planning, whether or not individual vehicles return from their missions. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) configured with high bandwidth communications links will allow survey vehicles to transfer their data while still underway, improving the efficiency of VSWMCM operations. Researchers at NPS are developing autopilot guidance algorithms that will allow UAVs to adopt and maintain an optimal loitering posture that ensures the best high bandwidth communications link between a command ship and multiple autonomous survey vehicles. OBJECTIVE