Metron's Autonomy, Navigation, Command & Control (ANCC) is an autonomy package enabling unmanned vehicles to complete fully autonomous, reliable, execution of complex vehicle missions without human oversight.

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Autonomy is the ability for computational or robotic systems to understand their environment and make the decisions necessary to complete a task or set of tasks with little to no human intervention. Metron’s ANCC is a state-of-the-art autonomy package for underwater missions.

Autonomy, Navigation, Command & Control (ANCC)

 

Metron’s ANCC provides a high-level autonomy package for use with unmanned vehicles, particularly underwater and surface vessels.

ANCC allows for fully autonomous vehicle missions with no human oversight, including transit missions, bottom and water-column survey missions, and specialized event-driven tasks (e.g., for bottom survey of offshore windfarm locations, or inspection of offshore oil infrastructure on the seafloor).

ANCC stands out in addressing the challenge of autonomous vehicle decision-making and supporting complex missions where many different behaviors must work as an ensemble for the autonomous system to function properly. Unlike command-level autonomy, ANCC is deliberative plan-based autonomy that combines behaviors through meta-planning: sequencing or interleaving plans of various behaviors to produce a coordinated response.

Real World Applications

Real World Applications

Commercial

  • survey of construction areas and infrastructure for near and offshore energy and transoceanic cables
  • search and rescue operations
  • maritime exploration
  • mobile sensors

Defense

  • extreme duration, undersea missions in deep or contested waters
  • perimeter surveillance, reconnaissance, and patrolling
  • mine clearance both at sea and on land

 

Key Capabilities

ANCC allows a vehicle to:

  • re-task itself in response to sensed natural or anthropogenic phenomena
  • update or generate plans and routes using its perception of the environment, based on off-board or sensed data
  • intelligently avoid seen or communicated obstacles while simultaneously considering task objectives, risk/cost trade-offs, and uncertainty

ANCC capabilities include:

  • deliberative obstacle avoidance logic
  • vehicle dynamics-aware survey planning logic
  • long-range transit planning logic
  • multi-sensor fusion for estimation of vehicle state
  • health fault monitoring
  • tasked-based mission execution respecting operator-set and derived constraints.

The ANCC design allows additional observers and controllers to be built where required (e.g., to translate from ANCC state and control concepts to those supported by the emerging UMAA standards).

Core Technologies

ANCC builds on Metron advances in the multiple research areas.

Autonomy

Metron designs and develops custom Resilient Mission Autonomy™ software that fuses fault detection, diagnosis, prognosis and mitigation with mission requirements, priorities, and platform capabilities.

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Self-Assessment

Metron is developing technologies to improve mission reliability for unmanned vehicles via improved prognostics, intelligent planning, and adaptive decision making.

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Perception

Metron develops tools that enable autonomous systems to process sensor data to make flexible planning decisions.

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We can help determine if ANCC is right for your application

Contact Metron for more information.

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Metron Careers

Autonomy Career Opportunities

Metron hires experts in applied mathematics, software engineering, operations research, and physical modeling.

Our engineers are developing innovative custom products, from design concepts through to deployment.

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