SPLASH
Abstract— Undersea exploration vehicles are used in a variety of ways, spanning industries from biological research of coral reefs to oil pipeline inspection and to military missions, and to name a few. Many of these tasks are best completed using unmanned undersea vehicles. Currently, most of these vehicles are designed for a single purpose and modifying these vehicles to perform a different task requires extensive changes to its software and hardware, resulting in high material and labor costs. In 2020, the US Navy and the IEEE community adopted a new standard called the Unmanned Maritime Autonomy Architecture (UMAA) which aims to create a common standard architecture upon which all vehicles and payloads can interact. This makes it possible for one vehicle to perform a wide variety of tasks with minimal changes. Our system is one of the first to demonstrate the application of this architecture with a benchtop hardware model highlighting the vehicle payload interaction as well as the operation of the vehicle’s basic controls and sensor interface.