Adaptive Mission Planning for Energy REsilience (AMPERE)

The Navy uses Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs), with different configurations and capabilities, for many critical missions. UUVs must dynamically adjust their onboard resources (e.g., energy usage) to unexpected situations to successfully complete missions, often with limited connectivity to the command and control stations. Unexpected situations can be caused by harsh underwater environments, or failures of the UUV’s software and hardware systems. UUVs are energy-constrained platforms, and operators often find it challenging to plan missions for the available onboard power budget because power consumption can vary unpredictably in response to dynamic underwater environments. To address the need for energy usage optimization onboard UUVs, Charles River Analytics is pleased to propose Adaptive Mission Planning for Energy REsilience (AMPERE), an intelligent performance manager that monitors and maintains a UUV’s power budget by dynamically adjusting mission parameters during execution. AMPERE is built on Charles River’s PRINCESS software, which was developed for the health and status monitoring of autonomous systems. In Phase I, we plan to demonstrate AMPERE through simulations using the UUV simulator developed previously for the ABBA program, which can simulate UUVs for most Navy missions in varying environmental conditions including underwater currents and bathymetry.