ONERA/ Thales: 10 years of cooperation to empower French mine-hunting drones
For 10 years now, ONERA has been fulfilling its mission of transferring its research on intelligent systems to the French military operational landscape. Today, the tools have evolved and allow the construction of a decision-making architecture with a distribution of the decision between the command systems and the drones.
In 2010, a decision-making architecture developed by ONERA enabled an underwater drone to detect, classify and locate dummy mines laid on the seabed off our coast. During the ten-hour technology demonstration of the autonomous mine-hunting system, the software architecture on board the drone supervised the mission and adapted the navigation and perception action plan for the autonomous underwater vehicle and the SAMDIS multi-view sonar, optimising mine location.
Today, the tools have changed with component-based development techniques and a generic ONERA software library can now be used to set up a decision-making architecture with a distribution of the decision between the command systems and the drones in modules broken down hierarchically according to the goals to be pursued.
ONERA is continuing its cooperation with Thales to provide decision-making autonomy for the underwater and surface drones involved in the Franco-British Maritime Mines Counter-Measures (MMCM) programme.
The components of the architectures were specified in detail in March 2021. The next step is the development of an architecture instance for a scenario involving an underwater drone and its qualification and demonstration in a dedicated Thales simulation workshop (Autonomy Studio Tool).
ONERA is thus fulfilling its mission of transferring its research on intelligent systems to the French military operational landscape.
