Automated mission parallelization for unmanned underwater vehicles

In the past Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) have been used to perform different tasks such as mapping the ocean floor and on-site exploration. Current research reveals even more applications for UUVs in many different areas including the military, scientific research, commercial uses, and even certain aspects of law enforcement. Unless missions for these applications can be written using a high-level programming language, many of these missions will be error prone and difficult to maintain, especially if missions are created for a group of cooperating UUVs to achieve a common goal. If the group contains UUVs that have different capabilities all together, writing and maintaining multiple missions for this heterogeneous group will be even more difficult. The goal in this paper is to propose methods that utilize an existing high-level Mission Programming Language (MPL) as a framework to allow a user to create a set of parallel submissions for a group of UUVs from a user specified mission. We discuss various methods of generating automatically a set of parallel sub-missions from this user specified mission and provide some preliminary results from our simulations that implement the proposed methods.