Validated Modular Autonomy for Undersea Multi-Vehicle Coordination

STTR topic DON27TZ02-NV004 (U.S. Department of Defense – Navy), Phase I and II. Open to U.S. small businesses; STTR projects partner with a U.S. research institution. Opens: December 2, 2026. Closes: January 6, 2027. Autonomous undersea vehicles performing expeditionary missions require state-of-the-art cooperative sensing and engagement capabilities. The Navy seeks to enhance those capabilities with modular software designed for reliability and operational effectiveness. The advancement sought is development of a modular coordination layer extending existing single vehicle with decentralized multi-vehicle behaviors to enable autonomous decision making under degraded communications, sensing, and PNT conditions. The software prototype needs to take in mission requirements provided by existing Navy command and control (C2) systems and sensor data provided by multiple platforms and use those inputs to coordinate mission performance with other vehicles. It should be compatible with modular unmanned autonomy architectures already in use by the Navy, such as the Open Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (OpenAUV) architecture and the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2). Within those architectures, the prototype must interface with existing autonomy designed for single-vehicle operations with minimal changes to already established systems. When the prototype is disabled or unnecessary, vehicle performance and behavior must conform to what would be expected of an unmodified single vehicle. The multi-mission management functions of the software prototype need to use a decentralized C2 scheme that is robust in low-information environments and that degrades gracefully if communications or sensing are limited. The C2 scheme must demonstrate sufficient scalability to effectively manage many vehicles: tens to hundreds. Real-time C2 is a must. The prototype should assume the primary sensing mode of each vehicle is acoustic. Realistic sensors include forward-look and side-scan sonar,…