Centro de Control de Tierra para Colaboracíon de Vehículos Autónomos Marinos

Abstract

The Ground Control Station (GCS) is one of the essential elements to supervise and control autonomous vehicles performing complex missions. The increasing number of systems that involve multiple autonomous vehicles is making traditional GCSs evolve to let them handle different vehicles and operators. In this article, we present the more relevant properties of a versatile adaptable GCS that has been especially designed to let multiple operators, each using a different computer equipment, be in charge of controlling a heterogeneous team of autonomous vehicles. Its main properties are the possibility of 1) reconfiguring which information is displayed to each operator, 2) defining alarms to draw the operators attention when required, and 3) re-Assigning, in real-Time, the vehicles to different operators. These properties are supported by a distributed design of the GCS software architecture, presented in the paper and consistent of: A communication module, a high level planner, replicable monitoring and supervising units, and as many commanders as vehicles within each mission. This GCS has been developed within SALACOM (an autonomous system for locating and acting against sea spills), where two Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) cooperate to collect a sea spill under the supervision of several operators that are responsible of the security of the mission. Finally, this paper also presents a case of use of the GCS within a real-world experiment involving two USVs performing leader-follower formation maneouvres.