Project HUGIN: heterogeneous unmanned group of intelligent USVs

Due to the current global political situation, threats to critical maritime infrastructures such as LNG terminals, ports, offshore wind farms, subsea pipelines and cables tend to increase. The protection of infrastructures is essential to prevent deterioration of societal structures and to maintain essential services and functions that impact the well-being and livelihood of citizens. To counter this threat, permanent protection is necessary, which is difficult to achieve through surveillance technology operated by people for reasons of cost and personnel. One solution is to deploy a cooperating team (swarm) of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) that coordinate with each other and independently carry out security tasks such as patrolling or surveillance and react intelligently to suspicious events.
Within the Fraunhofer project HUGIN "Heterogeneous Unmanned Group of INtelligent surface vehicles" the use of heterogeneous autonomous USVs for monitoring critical infrastructure and inspecting ship hulls was developed and tested. Up to three vehicles (two different platform types and heterogeneous sensor technology) were used. The team was assigned a joint task, which had to be divided into subtasks. The subtasks were forwarded to the vehicles with the appropriate capabilities to be completed independently. The autonomous mission processing and coordination of the three USVs was investigated. The algorithms were tested in dynamic cooperative operation with parallel execution of specific subtasks. To enable the efficient, effective and flexible operation of such systems and the integration of the operator into the overall system, we used the Management by Objective (MbO) concept. MbO for parallel operating autonomous USVs is separated into three main aspects: Vehicle autonomy, Product creation control cycle, and Mission management. Both, the autonomous cooperative behavior of the vehicles which affect vehicle autonomy as well as mission management and the operator-independent sensor data evaluation (product generation) were further developed and tested in HUGIN.