White Paper Software Architecture and Strategic Plans for Undersea Cooperative Cueing and Intervention

The Undersea Cooperative Cueing and Intervention (UC2I) Program objectives include a heavy emphasis on developing autonomy for both unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) and Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs). The mission objective is to utilize a collection of such assets, each with different sensors, range, endurance, speed, and communications capabilities to work together to rapidly search and map a minefield area on the order of 100 x 100 kilometers in five days or under. This program explores the gain achieved by utilizing assets in a coordinated manner. Working together includes not only intervehicle cueing and sharing of information, but also the transportation, launch and recovery of UUVs from USVs. The possible configurations of platform assets, sensors, sensing algorithms, navigation algorithms and autonomy algorithms is enormous. Of significant concern to the Navy and the execution of this program is the ability to explore this configuration space to find the most effective system for achieving mission objectives. Practically speaking, this not only requires that software solutions are decoupled from hardware solutions, but that the collection of software modules that comprise the sensing, navigation and vehicle autonomy algorithms are also decoupled from one another. This white paper outlines the plan and software architecture ground rules for the UC2I program to meet that objective.