The Autonomous Unmanned Vehicle Workbench: Mission Planning, Mission Rehearsal, and Mission Replay Tool for Physics-based X3d Visualization

In recent years, numerous military and civilian applications for autonomous underwater vehicles have been identified or proposed and a number of production and research vehicles have been developed to address many of these. However, the use of vehicle-specific data formats and mission planning systems hampers cooperative research efforts by fostering the implementation of stove-pipe systems. Additionally, the lack of physics-based playback and tightly coupled twoand threedimensional (2D/3D) visualization environments typically precludes realistic mission rehearsal or high-fidelity playback. The Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Autonomous Unmanned Vehicle Workbench (AUVW) bridges the gap between dissimilar vehicles by providing a mission planning, rehearsal, and replay tool for arbitrary unmanned vehicles (UV). The AUVW is designed around the capabilities of the Autonomous Vehicle Control Language (AVCL), an Extensible Markup Language (XML) vocabulary for task-level mission specification, vehicle telemetry, control orders and sensor data. Also integral to the AUVW is physical simulation of planned missions in a virtual environment (VE) using a six degree of freedom (6DOF) vehicle-response model that is parameterized for a variety of vehicles. The vehicle-independent nature of AVCL, enables the AUVW user to design and test missions for arbitrary vehicles using a single format. Once satisfactory performance is obtained in the virtual environment (VE), the AVCL mission is transformed to vehicle-specific format using the Extensible Stylesheet Language for Transformations (XSLT) and loaded into the vehicle. In similar fashion, vehicle-specific data can be parsed using a context free grammar (CFG) and transformed into AVCL for editing and testing with the AUVW. 3D visualization utilizes a variety of archived and autogenerated scenes authored in Extensible 3D (X3D) graphics, the ISO-approved standard for 3D graphics on the web and the Xj3D open-source toolkit for X3D-compliant application development.