AVCL: An Extensible Markup Language (XML) Vocabulary Supporting Autonomous Vehicle Interoperability
CDR Duane Davis USN, Naval Postgraduate School
AVCL is the mission command language used by the AUV Workbench for mission planning, rehearsal and operations. Details follow.
While numerous military and civilian uses for autonomous air, ground, surface, and undersea vehicles have been identified or proposed, and a few available products attempt to meet some of these, a critical shortcoming exists that will inhibit the implementation of systems that adequately address the majority of these potential applications. The fact of the matter is that vehicle-specific data formats and mission planning systems preclude effective coordination in multi-vehicle systems and hinder the design of such systems (even those wherein individual vehicles operate more or less independently to achieve a common goal).
To date the preponderance of research into coordinated operations of multiple autonomous vehicles has assumed that the vehicles involved are inherently compatible. That is, either the multi-vehicle system consists solely of one type of vehicle, or all vehicles use the same language for mission specification and inter-vehicle communication. Unfortunately, this is unrealistic given current inventories of legacy vehicles and the parallel development of vehicles by various commercial, academic, and government entities. It is precisely this gap that a common autonomous vehicle control language (AVCL) is intended to fill.
A well-defined common format for mission-specification (tasking), inter-vehicle communication, and mission-results, coupled with utilities for the automatic conversion of data in this format to and from vehicle-specific formats can serve as a bridge between dissimilar autonomous vehicles. This AVCL will facilitate coordinated operations between dissimilar vehicles and enable their human operators to provide more effective tasking for systems of dissimilar vehicles and interact with vehicles during their missions.
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