Formal Advanced Mission Planning Specification

Transcription

1 Faculty of Engineering University of Porto Formal Advanced Mission Planning Specification Pedro Filipe Lopes Maçaira Nogueira FINAL PREPARATION REPORT Final preparation report conducted within the Master Dissertation of the Integrated Master in Electrical and Computers Engineering Branch: Automation Supervisor: Eng. João Tasso Borges de Sousa July 6, 2012

2 Contents Contents... ii List of Figures... iii Acronyms... iv Introduction... 1 Background Introduction Unmanned vehicles Control Architecture Single-Vehicle Control Architecture Multi-Vehicle Control Architecture Neptus Overview IMC Overview Dune... 7 Literature and State of Art Introduction Mission Planning and Specification... 8 The Problem Statement Planning Work Control Annex A ii

3 List of Figures Figure 1 Joint operation scenario between UAV s, AUV s and ASV s... 3 Figure 2 LAUV Models completely developed at LSTS-FEUP... 3 Figure 3 Isurus, a Woods Hole REMUS with reworked electronics and control software Figure 4 Examples of available UAV models at LSTS-FEUP... 4 Figure 5 ASV Swordfish, a commercial catamaran with added hardware and control software... 4 Figure 6 - Examples of available ROV models at LSTS-FEUP... 4 Figure 7 - Vehicle control architecture (adapted from [5])... 5 Figure 8 LSTS layered control architecture (adapted from [5])... 6 Figure 9 Neptus interface console... 6 Figure 10 - IMC message flow in Seascout Light AUV [8]... 7 Figure 11 Flight plan structure and XML description [10]... 8 Figure 12 Petri net mission [12]... 9 Figure 13 - A linear hybrid automaton used to model aircraft dynamics [14] Figure 14 System Interface Figure 15 System Architecture Figure 16 Gantt chart... 14

4 Acronyms UAV Unmanned Aerial Vehicle AUV Autonomous Underwater Vehicle ROV Remotly Operated Vehicle ASV Autonomous Surface Vehicle PITVANT Projecto de Investigação e Tecnologia em Veículos Aéreos Não-Tripulado (Research and Technology in UAVs Project) FEUP Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (Faculty of Engineering University of Porto) AFA Académia da Força Aérea (Portuguese Air Force Academy) LSTS Laboratório de Sistemas e Tecnologia Subaquática (Underwater Systems and Technology laboratory) IMC Inter Module Communication XML Extensible Markup Language W3C World Wide Web Consortium UAS Unmanned Aerial System iv

5 Chapter 1 Introduction Over the last decades, and due to robotics technology evolution, several unmanned vehicles have been developed for military, search and rescue operations. By definition a military operation is the coordinated military actions in response to a developing situation and these actions are designed as military plan. This is, a formal plan for military armed forces, their military organizations and units to conduct operations, as drawn up by their commanders in order to achieve the objectives. These plans are generally produced in accordance with the military doctrine of the troops involved. It helps standardize operations, facilitating readiness by establishing common ways of accomplishing military tasks. Just as purely human operations need to be planned following standardized procedures, so combined operations between human, manned and unmanned vehicles need. It is known that a successful planning is a crucial step to achieve desired goals. This project will focus on developing specification files to be implemented in an advanced mission planning system with the objective to standardize mission plans and to facilitate the inter-operability between different unmanned vehicles as UAV s, AUV s, ROV s and ASV s in advanced joint operations. As being part of a greater project named Projecto de Investigação e Tecnologia em Veículos Aéreos Não-Tripulados (Research and Tecnology in UAV s Project), that arises from a joint operation of Laboratório de Sistemas e Tecnologia Subaquática (Underwater Systems and Technology Laboratory) and Academia da Força Aérea (Portuguese Air Force Academy), this project will be implemented using technologies developed at LSTS. Completing this document there will be four more chapters. The next one gives an overview on the project background, followed by the literature and state of the art review. The problem definition comes in the fourth chapter and the last one presents the work plan for the development of the dissertation. 1

6 Chapter 2 Background Introduction The Projecto de Investigação e Tecnologia em Veículos Aéreos Não-Tripulados (Research and Tecnology in UAV s Project) arises from a joint operation between Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (Faculty of Engineering University of Porto) and Academia da Força Aérea (Portuguese Air Force Academy), being the third stage of a greater project that began in 1996 in AFA. This stage began due to the achieved results in the early stages, started January 2009 and has a scheduled end to December Some of the specific PITVANT objectives are to develop several technologies as: Cooperative control for multiple UAVs with mixed initiative Data fusion systems Navigation systems Vehicle-interoperability and the standardization of interactions And to train personnel with the ability to define requirements, to operate and maintain UAV s [1]. The Laboratório de Sistemas e Tecnologia Subaquática (Underwater Systems and Technology Laboratory) have been developing, designing and building several autonomous and remotely operated vehicles as well as several tools with the goal of deploying networked vehicle systems for oceanographic and environmental applications [2][3]: Unmanned vehicles UAV s, AUV s, ROV s, ASV s (section ) Neptus (section ) IMC (section ) Dune (section ) Developing joint operations between LSTS, which focuses on the development of surface and underwater unmanned vehicles, and the PITVANT project specifies one of the more interesting operational scenarios (see Figure 1Figure ). 2

7 Unmanned vehicles 3 Figure 1 Joint operation scenario between UAV s, AUV s and ASV s Unmanned vehicles As stated earlier the LSTS has a wide variety of available unmanned vehicles developed entirely at FEUP, some in cooperation with AFA and other were only reworked from existing plantafroms [4]: AUV s NAUV; LAUV SeaCon(Figure 2a), Xtreme(Figure 2b), Green, Black, Blue; Isurus (Figure 3); UAV s UAV Alfa Series (01, 02, 03, 04, 05) (Figure 4a); UAV Pilatos 2; UAV Pilatos 3 (Figure 4b); UAV Lusitânia (Figure 4c); ASV s Swordfish (Figure 5); ROV s ROV-KOS (Figure 6a); ROV-IES(Figure 6b); a) LAUV Extreme b) LAUV SeaCon Figure 2 LAUV Models completely developed at LSTS-FEUP

8 4 Background Figure 3 Isurus, a Woods Hole REMUS with reworked electronics and control software. a) UAV Alfa 03 (Alfa series) b) UAV Pilatos 3 (COTS Model) c) UAV Lusitânia Figure 4 Examples of available UAV models at LSTS-FEUP Figure 5 ASV Swordfish, a commercial catamaran with added hardware and control software a) ROV-KOS, completely developed at LSTS b) ROV-IES, reworked PHANTOM 500 Figure 6 - Examples of available ROV models at LSTS-FEUP 4

9 Control Architecture Control Architecture LSTS has a layered approach to planning and executing control, and consists of two main layers: multi-vehicle control and vehicle control Single-Vehicle Control Architecture Vehicles control architecture consists of four layers: low-level controllers, manoeuvre controller, vehicle supervisor and mission supervisor (Figure 7), and it is standard for all vehicles. The concept of manoeuvre, an action/motion description for a single vehicle, is used as the atomic component of all execution concepts and it is abstracted from being provided by vehicles.[5] This concept plays a crucial role in the control architecture as it simplifies the task of mission specification; it is easily understood by a mission operator; it is easily mapped onto low-level controllers, since it encodes the control logic; and if defines clear interface to other control elements.[6] The vehicle supervisor controls all the on board activities and accepts manoeuvre and configuration commands either from the mission supervisor or external controllers. Interactions between external controllers and the vehicle are ruled by an abstract vehicle interface (section ). The mission supervisor, simply put, commands and controls the mission plan by exchanging manoeuvre and configuration commands to the vehicle supervisor that will trigger the execution of a manoeuvre by passing the manoeuvre parameters to the corresponding low-level controllers. Mission supervisor will only proceed with the next mission manoeuvre if it receives the completion acknowledgment of the previous one [5][7]. Figure 7 - Vehicle control architecture (adapted from [5])

10 6 Background Multi-Vehicle Control Architecture The multi-vehicle control architecture is the extension of the single-vehicle control architecture with the introduction of another layer, the team controller layer, on the top on the previous ones. The team controller layer extends some of the concepts of the singlevehicle control architecture, sub-layers as the team supervisor and team manoeuvre that will command and supervise the execution of team manoeuvres. With this architecture the vehicle supervisor accepts manoeuvre and configuration commands from either external controller, plan supervisor or team controllers. [7]. Figure 8 LSTS layered control architecture (adapted from [5]) Neptus Overview Neptus is a Java based tool fully developed at LSTS-FEUP that allows the interaction with several manned and unmanned vehicles. It is a distributed command and control framework for operations with networked vehicles, sensors, and human operators and supports all phases of a mission life cycle: world representation; planning; simulation; execution and postmission analysis [3]. Figure 9 Neptus interface console 6

11 IMC Overview IMC Overview Inter-Module Communication (IMC) is a message-oriented protocol developed at LSTS- FEUP. It was developed for communication between different unmanned vehicles, sensors and mission management interfaces (external controllers) [8]. Figure 10 - IMC message flow in Seascout Light AUV [8] shows a typical message flow in an AUV. Figure 10 - IMC message flow in Seascout Light AUV [8] Dune Dune is a software tool developed at LSTS that integrates the UAS. This software runs in a small computer and has the ability not only to command the UAV but also has drivers for acquisition, navigation and manoeuvre control systems. Dune communicates with the ground station using the IMC protocol.

12 Chapter 3 Literature and State of Art Introduction The mission planning problem is, simply put, that the vehicle is given a list of mission objectives which it must satisfy, and to satisfy them a plan must be generated of how to reach them given that there are restrictions that must be considered [9]. Several approaches to mission planning and specification have been made, some of them are single vehicle other multi-vehicle missions. Some approaches are described next Mission Planning and Specification In [10] it is described a flight plan manager for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) that given a proposed specification language organizes the flight into stages, each one representing a different flight phase, and containing a number of legs that specify the flight path during the execution of the stage, being the flight primitives dynamically translated to waypoints. An XML [11] document is used to store the flight plan related data. Figure 11 Flight plan structure and XML description [10] 8

13 Mission Planning and Specification 9 In [12] a different approach is made for planning an UAV mission. The vehicle behaviour during is specified by a detailed Petri nets [13], directed graphs with two different nodes: places and transitions. This approach models the possible states of the vehicle in places and the change between states are modelled by the transactions. The typical phases of these missions are take-off, navigation to a mission area, operation on the mission area and return to landing area and each one can be broken up in an increasingly detailed way. The Petri nets are developed off line by means of specific graphic user interface. Figure 12 Petri net mission [12] Another way to approach the task of formally plan a mission for an UAV is using hybrid automata, a well suited approach for modelling and verifying hybrid systems. In [14] it is described how to use it to model the vehicle and its operating environment. The plan is decomposed in its component phases and each one is described either by the coordinates of a pair of way-points and by the speed at which the vehicle or by its duration, an initial waypoint and the speed of vehicle. A phase is completed when the second way-point is reached by the vehicle or when the time has elapsed, depending on the phase specifications. The concepts of parameterized flight plan and flight plan instantiation are introduced.

14 10 Literature and State of Art Figure 13, shows a partial flight plan with three phases: Flight at best-range speed at a constant altitude of z meters, from way-point WP1=(x1,y1,z) to way-point WP2 =(x2,y2,z). Hover at WP2 =(x2,y2,z) for t2 seconds. Return to WP1 =(x1,y1,z) at maximum speed. Figure 13 - A linear hybrid automaton used to model aircraft dynamics [14] 10

15 Chapter 4 The Problem High Level Planners - The high level planners generate plans at an abstract level. In order to achieve the desired objectives, mission plans need to be appropriately specified. The job of high level planners is to generate such mission plans given the objectives, and the vehicle and environment constraints. Plans may have a high degree of autonomy, or may involve significant user interaction during plan execution. Plan generation may itself involve different levels of user inputs. [ ] Initially high level planners will consist of humans specifying the plans themselves depending on the objectives desired. [5] Statement An advanced mission planner system is to be developed that according with pre-defined mission specification files will generate mission plans for a team of several unmanned vehicles in a specific operational scenario, as in Figure 1. The mission specification should provide the mechanism to describe the path and actions that the unmanned vehicles should follow and do. Figure 14 System Interface The system will have an interface (Figure 14 System Interface) that allows the mission developer to create the mission stages and flow, stages transactions, assign vehicles to stages and define actions to be performed. In order to the system know which vehicles are available 11

16 12 The Problem and what actions can be performed by them, a data base should be created containing the vehicles model file. These files will have to be created according to pre-defined specifications too. The system should fit in a typical operation setup as represented in Figure 15. Figure 15 System Architecture 12

17 Chapter 5 Planning Work Control This chapter presents the planning of the tasks for the semester when the dissertation will be developed. It is very important that the work developed matches the work plan defined because only that way it is possible to reach the proposed objectives. The work plan should be changed in case a task takes more time than what was proposed so that the work keeps organized. The dissertation period will be from September 10 th to February 29 th. The development will be divided in 8 major tasks (highlighted in Figure 16 Gantt chart): Introduction to PITVANT PITVANT Command and Control Architecture Review Background Research Requirements Survey Build system specification documents Approach Simulation Tests Real-World Tests The first four tasks emphasize the understanding and comprehension of the background project PITVANT as well as the developed tools and systems architectures. It is important that the system developed in this project meets the requirements of the PITVANT project. The next task will focus on the development of the specification documents to the advanced mission planner according to the specification language chosen. Building mission plans and testing them in simulated or real-world scenarios will be the last project tasks. 13

18 Annex A Figure 16 Gantt chart 14

19 Bibliography [1] P. D. E. Investiga, T. E. M. Ve, and R. Aut, II Série Cadernos do IDN, vol. 2008, pp. 9-24, [2] F. L. Pereira, P. F. Souto, and L. Madureira, DISTRIBUTED SENSOR AND VEHICLE NETWORKED SYSTEMS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL APPLICATIONS, no. May 2003, pp. 1-6, [3] J. Pinto et al., Neptus A Framework to Support a Mission Life Cycle, in 7th IFAC Conference on Manoeuvring and Control of Marine Craft, [4] Laboratório de Sistemas e Tecnologia Subaquática. [Online]. Available: [5] M. E. Angelopoulou et al., NOPTILUS : System Specifications, [6] P. S. Dias, R. M. F. Gomes, and F. L. Pereira, Mission Planning and Specification in the Neptus Framework, no. May, pp , [7] M. Correia et al., OPERATIONS AND CONTROL OF UNMANNED UNDERWATER VEHICLES, [8] R. Martins, P. S. Dias, E. R. B. Marques, J. Pinto, J. B. Sousa, and F. L. Pereira, IMC: A communication protocol for networked vehicles and sensors, Oceans 2009-Europe, pp. 1-6, May [9] P. Eleventh, A. International, A. Congress, F. Australasian, U. Air, and V. Conference, Highly Autonomous UAV Mission Planning and Piloting for Civilian Airspace Operations, vol. 2005, [10] E. Santamaria, E. Pastor, C. Barrado, X. Prats, P. Royo, and M. Perez, Flight Plan Specification and Management for Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, Dec [11] W3C, Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition), p [12] M. Barbier and E. Chanthery, Autonomous mission management for unmanned aerial vehicles, Aerospace Science and Technology, vol. 8, no. 4, pp , Jun [13] T. Murata, Petri Nets: Properties, Analysis and Applications [14] C. W. Seibel and J.-marie Farines, Towards Using Hybrid Automata for the Mission Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, pp

20 16 Annex A [15] C. Usw, B. Watkins, and A. Room, THE AUTONOMOUS UNMANNED VEHICLE WORKBENCH : MISSION PLANNING, MISSION REHEARSAL, AND MISSION REPLAY TOOL FOR PHYSICS-BASED X3D VISUALIZATION Duane T. Davis, Naval Postgraduate School Watkins Annex Room 265 Don Brutzman, Naval Postgraduate School Watk, no. August, pp. 1-12,