Researchers make robot subs talk to each other - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Researchers make robot subs talk to each other

BAYVIEW, Idaho — An underwater communications project is quite an enterprise for University of Idaho research engineers.

Well, not that Enterprise, but some of the crew is on board.

“We named the computer boards from characters in Star Trek,” researcher Thomas Bean said. “The command board we call Capt. Kirk. The board that controls the motor we call Scotty, and the communications board is Lt. Uhura.”

And while their vessel is not going where no man has gone before, it is helping to break new ground, er, water, for autonomous underwater vehicles.

That’s a fancy way to say robot subs.

The U of I, through federal grants, is teaching its fleet of five AUVs to work both as a team as well as individually to perform a variety of undersea search tasks.

John Canning is the research engineer in charge of the three-man team, including Bean and Geoffrey Beidler, who have been using the Acoustic Research Detachment base at Bayview as their giant bathtub, and their 40-inch long, four-inch plastic subs, which putter around the pond with battery-driven propellers at a maximum three knots.

Ultimately, the research could be incorporated into robots to more effectively hunt down ship-killer underwater mines.

“The Navy is interested in mine countermeasures,” Canning said. “They are interested in searching very large areas for mines.”

The objective of the project, the U of I Web site said, is to develop a comprehensive design procedure for communication among, and decentralized control of, a fleet of AUVs. The vehicles will be capable of organizing themselves in specified geometric patterns and navigating between predetermined points and around obstacles.

The university’s Center for Intelligent Systems Research is an eclectic research group consisting of faculty, students and engineers from the Departments of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science.

Founded in 1999, it is an approved research center of the Idaho State Board of Education and operates under the auspices of the Microelectronics Research and Communications Institute, one of several research institutes sanctioned by the university.

The AUV program is run under the direction of professor Dean Edwards.

Canning said Edwards has extensive experience in developing autonomous vehicles.

“Before this, it’s been ground vehicles,” he said. “This seemed like a natural extension.

“Whether it’s on the land, in the air or the sea, you still have to figure out where you are at, what you are doing and where you are heading,” Canning said.

That’s where the little subs come in.

“Our research is aimed at getting the vehicles to collaborate and cooperate, to work together and communicate what they find, so if we lose one, we won’t lose the information we have on board.”

That includes developing procedures to give each of the subs the ability to take over if something happened to the leader.

“It’s basically a hat that can be passed back and forth,” Canning said.

Recently, the crew was telling the subs, who were working that day in a four-vehicle squadron, to direct one of the boats to break out of its search pattern to inspect a target, then return to the pattern. The boats normally operate in about three feet of water, but have been as deep as 20 feet.

Because they do not exchange water and air as ballast, they “fly” through the water using tail planes to dive or ascend. If the motor quits, they are buoyant enough to eventually float back to the surface, so long as nothing underwater holds them down.

Canning said the developments made with the small UAVs are expected to be transferred to the operational mine countermeasures robot subs called REMUS, or Remote Environmental Monitoring Units, now deployed with active duty Navy and special operations units.

The MCM subs were used in 2003 during the opening stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom, then later, to help sweep captured areas for mines.

Canning said the upgrade they are testing would allow groups of 50 or more search subs to be sent out to scan an area, with the capability to communicate, exchange data and re-assign task and search areas if individual boats are lost. The group can also break into sub-groups as small as two.

Once a hostile target is found, the boat reports its find and a minesweeper ship or even a robot hunter-killer, called a lemming, can be sent to destroy the mine.

“Mine hunting and mine clearing is slow, tedious and dangerous work, particularly in littoral areas with challenging environmental conditions,” said Rear Adm. Paul J. Ryan, the commander of the Navy’s Mine Warfare Command. “The overall coalition mine countermeasures operations in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom were successful because of the training and dedication of our people, coupled with having the right equipment at their disposal.

“The U.S. Navy’s investment in mine warfare is like an insurance policy: You don’t want to spend too much, but you are glad you have it when you need it. In this case, our investment paid off,” Ryan said.

CISR’s work could sharpen the Navy’s tools to make them more effective.

Canning said the test boats, which cost $15,000 each, communicate with underwater transponders developed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which uses the water as radio carrier waves.

It also uses mini-computer modems and sonar units to navigate obstacles in the water, in this case buoys.

The robot “sends out a ping, and then get an echo back for the buoy. Then, by triangulating the returns, the ships can determine their location.”

The subs communicate with the surface through a wireless Internet connection.

“In fact, each one of these subs hosts its own Web page” to deal with the data exchange, Canning said.

“I don’t know if it’s receiving spam ads for Cialis,” he joked.

But before the brains are installed in the Navy’s brawn, there’s a learning curve to accomplish.

“It’s getting [the MCMs] to work together and cooperate, which is the aim of our research,” he said. “Right now, they operate totally independently.”

Canning said although it’s an theoretical engineering project, experts in several different disciplines are involved, including mechanical and electrical engineering and computer science.

“We also have a couple of philosophers who developed the communication language,” he said.

In addition to the REMUS subs, the technology developed at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division facilities at Bayview can be used for other autonomous vehicles, on or below the surface, in the air or on the land.

The CISR program, Canning said, was partly a simple matter of thinking outside the box.

“We could do this right now with the intersub communications we have,” Canning said. “It’s just nobody’s taken advantage of it.”

Next, Canning said the U of I might work on developing a system to measure magnetic signatures of ships, to help develop ways to make ships less attractive to mines.

But that’s just another frontier to explore.