The Orca Project
The Orca Project
The Orca project's goal is to create an intelligent, robust, adaptive controller for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The initial target vehicle for development was the Autonomous Undersea Institute's EAVE (Experimental Autonomous VEhicle) AUVs. When complete, the program will be used to conduct real ocean science missions, for example, global change monitoring and benthic observation. Orca will be used both for single-agent and multiagent (e.g., autonomous oceanographic sampling network, AOSN) missions.
Orca is named for Orcinus orca, the "killer whale", the most intelligent animal in the ocean. We hope that Orca will live up to its namesake in this regard and in another. Orcas are pack animals, coordinating their behavior with others. Our Orca is being designed in the context of the Maine Cooperative Distributed Problem Solving research group, a group of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates focusing their research efforts on cooperation between intelligent agents. Orca is designed to be the controller for the agents. The CDPS research group is part of the MaineSAIL, the Maine Software Agents & AI Laboratory.
Initial funding for Orca was from grant BES-9696044 from the National Science Foundation's Division of Bioengineering and Environmental Systems. Current funding is from the Office of Naval Research (DEPSCoR program), grant N00014-00-1-0614.
Publications are now listed on the publications page of MaineSAIL.
An on-line version of the grant proposal for the current funding is also available.