Map the Gap - Autonomous Gap Crossing Survey

Project Description and Services Provided

The Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) 2-phase competition run by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) was put in place to find technologies to demonstrate unmanned reconnaissance which would allow troops to safely and stealthily advance into hostile territory over water.

Wet gaps such wide rivers can become campaign critical obstacles. Military units require enabling capabilities to cross these gaps in suitable points. Currently, the only way of identifying suitable crossing points is to send Royal Engineer reconnaissance troops to survey both banks of the river. The current methods are laborious and utilise manually operated basic survey equipment to take readings to generate a gap profile and obtain key characteristics, such as the banks’ ground bearing capacity, to inform crossing requirements. This method exposes soldiers to danger at the forward edge of the battlefield, and also risks compromising the potential crossing point by revealing location interest.

Consortium

Amentum in partnership with Digital Concepts Engineering (DCE, Project lead), TP Group and Frazer-Nash Consultancy developed and presented a Multi-modal multi-vehicle solution composed by an Aerial Unmanned System (UAS) and an Amphibious Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) carrying a set of sensors and autonomy solutions to perform the reconnaissance task. In the first phase of the project, another partner Eijkelkamp GeoPoint SoilSolutions provided ground sensing and TP Group was not in the partnership.

Solution Overview

The operation started with the UAS performing an autonomous aerial survey of the area of interest to locate possible crossing paths providing a high-level path plan for the UGV. Then the UGV surveyed the land checking the soil’s bearing capacities at different points and afterwards it entered the water (a GPS denied environment) where using its onboard sensors would localise itself and map the riverbed also collecting discrete water column velocity measurements. Data was recorded and filtered throughout and synchronised with Sixth Sense in the control station once the wireless link was strong enough to send all the data for analysis and reporting. Sixth Sense presented a 2-level reporting interface, firstly a fully 3D environment to analyse the data from which a concise report was generated for decision making.

Solutions and Outcomes

Amentum contribution to this project:

• Development of Sixth Sense for the application’s data management, reporting and analytics.

• Provide underwater surveying capabilities both in hardware and software.

• Support for systems integration and data localisation.

• Project and trials management.

Sixth Sense

Sixth Sense is Amentum data management and analytics tool that has been developed since 2018 under the second phase of Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA)'s Integrated Innovation for Nuclear Decommissioning competition as the data and decommissioning campaign management tool.

Data Reporting with Sixth sense

Analysing current processes used for gap crossing reporting, the team decided on a two-level reporting interface, the first level being a detailed 3D interface with all data acquired by the systems. From there, a report of each crossing site was created using a wizard-type process which automated some of the manual calculations that would have been performed previously. The second level was a view of this report that would be used by a commander to make decisions. All these interfaces were web-based, therefore device agnostic meaning that they can be used on a tablet or a computer. Engagement with stakeholders showed that having all data available properly located in a map was essential and the familiarity brought by the summarised reporting interface was a benefit for user acceptance.

Data Management with Sixth sense

The project allowed Sixth Sense to improve its back end to make it more future proof, including a scalable programmatic interface, synchronisation for distributed instances and a development pipeline as used in modern applications. This back-end enabled web interfaces to allow 3D data to be reported in a web view.

Underwater Surveying

To provide underwater surveying a solution based on sonar was developed which integrated two complex underwater sensors, the front looking (FLS) and bathymetry sonars, both in hardware (mounted on the UGV) and software to control the devices, reading and converting the data to make it available to the robot.

The FLS provided information for navigation and obstacle avoidance, whereas the bathymetry sonar provided distance measurements which were integrated to a software pipeline composed by several layers of filtering and accumulation of data points, generating a 3D (point cloud) image.

Robotic Integration

Amentum managed the integration of the robotic systems which included hardware, software, and data components from all partners and other commercial off the shelf equipment. From design to implementation, Amentum lead the integration providing architecture and the necessary software components. Besides sensor and algorithm integration, components to visualise and monitor the live state of the system were provided which were essential for the development of the system.

Outcomes

The team produced a mid-TRL autonomous reconnaissance solution which presented in user friendly views the data to inform the command to decide on where and how to cross the surveyed gap. Although the version of the solution made and tested functioned as per the project requirements some changes would be needed to make it useable for the army in real life scenarios.