Towards Autonomous Weapons Movement on an Aircraft Carrier: Autonomous Swarm Parking

Abstract

To maintain weapons throughput on Nimitz class aircraft carriers, aviation ordnance is transported from the magazines to the flight deck and loaded onto aircraft in a process called “Strike Up”. This time and labor intensive process requires multiple sailors to push weapon skids through the aircraft carrier to staging area on the flight deck. Augmenting sailor tasking through the use of robotic equipment is one method to improve sortie generation rates (launching of aircraft), optimize manpower, and lower risk to sailors. Seen in Fig. 1, weapons skids spend extended time parked in various locations along their routes such as on elevators or in portions of hangar decks. This work presents improvements to the authors’ previous work [1] to develop a Human Machine Interface (HMI) and the appropriate control methods toward supervisory control for parking multiple robotic skids in a cluttered and dynamic environment. The HMI consists of four parts: (1) the user interface, (2) automated definition and conflict free assignment of parking goals within a user defined parking boundary, (3) collision free navigation with multiple differential drive robotic vehicles, and (4) an external infrastructure-free approach to localization and mapping. Distribution Statement A – Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited, as submitted under NAVAIR Public Release Authorization YY-2018–28.