SeeByte awarded Maritime Autonomous Systems interoperability demonstration contract
Interoperability in Maritime Autonomous Systems. (Photo: Dstl/ Crown Copyright)
SeeByte will modify its mission-level autonomy system, Neptune, to demonstrate interoperability between different autonomous systems.
Dstl has awarded SeeByte a contract under its R-Cloud framework to continue work with the SCI-343 Research Task Group (RTG) “Enabling Federated, Collaborative Autonomy”.
The research aims to mature and test a communications protocol enabling the autonomous collaboration of robotic vehicles across domains in communication-linked environments.
The goal is to allow systems operating with any autonomy software to integrate with the protocol and interoperate with other systems using the protocol.
SeeByte engineering manager Andrea Munafo said: Interoperability between autonomous systems, and in particular in comms limited environments, is a great challenge in the underwater domain.
‘It is a great opportunity for us to provide a solution and to demonstrate this capability at sea.’
Neptune allows multiple tasks to be run in parallel, with vehicles automatically taking up responsibility for them. Vehicles can swap tasks, add new ones or manage problems optimising mission execution.
SeeByte plans to demonstrate its collaborative autonomy capability using SCI-343 at sea during REPMUS 2022.
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