Page 38: of Marine Technology Magazine (October 2015)

Software Solutions

Autonomy by (Sof ware) Design ver the last decade or so there have been rapid The next step up in complexity, traditionally referred to as advancements in the area of maritime smart soft- decision support, relies on the smart software to reduce the ware and autonomy solutions, with developments amount / complexity of data that the human operator has to

Oranging from advanced 3D graphical interfaces, view. The traditional example would be setting an alarm on operator-in-the-loop assistance all the way to un-assisted au- temperature readings but modern software can process more tonomous adaptive operations. Adaptive is to say that the ve- complex data and identify subtler trends.

hicles are being equipped with the capabilities to re-plan and Moving up again in sophistication, the software processing change their missions and behavior in response to feedback can be used to achieve “operator-in-the-loop” autonomy. This from the data they have gathered. A major focus for these de- might be adaptive control of the vehicle while the operator velopments has been on software solutions to enhance the ca- monitors progress and intervenes where necessary. pabilities of UUVs (Unmanned Underwater Vehicles) where, The ? nal stage of smart software processing is for full au- because of the low-bandwidth acoustic communication, ap- tonomy without the operator directly involved. In this case, proaches used in other domains are not applicable. For ex- vehicles are capable of carrying out full missions indepen- ample, UUV missions are typically going to transmit 30 bytes dently of operator input, even going so far as to adapt their every few minutes, in contrast to an aerial drone that may have behavior in response to the external environment. The main multiple HD video streams. advantage to full autonomy is in situations where the vehicle has to operate for extended periods in a remote, hard-to-access

Smart Software Moving Towards Full Autonomy or dangerous location.

The concept of autonomy and smart software can cover a wide range of levels of autonomy. To start with, this advanced SeeByte Neptune software processing can be as straight-forward as improving SeeByte developed a suite of software tools to provide en- the visualization of the incoming data. This might mean, for hanced command and control capabilities for off-board assets. example, using 3D graphics techniques to help an operator Neptune provides a payload control architecture and real process large volumes of data. time autonomy engine for unmanned systems to plan and

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