Goal-Based, Collaborative Autonomy
Our mission-level autonomy system provides optimal mission execution and goal-based planning for squads of uncrewed maritime systems. Neptune automatically matches survey areas and objectives to the available assets and their capabilities. It will adapt to changes in the environment during a mission, and will coordinate assets to ensure mission success. Neptune enables uncrewed maritime systems to be used to their full potential and has been adopted by the US, UK, Canadian, and Dutch Navies for use in Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Mine Countermeasure missions.
Neptune can integrate with a diverse range of uncrewed maritime systems, enabling operators to coordinate multiple assets to perform different behaviours as part of a single operation. Neptune recognises common behaviours such as survey an area, survey a target, or loiter, making it possible for the autonomy to re-assign an asset to a different task during a mission.
Key Features
From goal-based planning through to complex missions in comms-denied environments, Neptune paves the way to mission success.
Neptune allows mission plans to be built using a set of goals, rather than individual waypoints. The goal-based plan is then assigned to the squad for execution using embedded autonomy behaviours. This goal-based planning is proven to allow faster mission planning with less errors.
During the mission, Neptune enables your vehicles to adapt to changes in the environment, mission objectives, or other vehicles. For example, healthy vehicles will automatically take over from failing vehicles to ensure the mission is successful.
Neptune's decentralised autonomy architecture allows multiple tasks to be run in parallel, with the vehicles automatically taking responsibility for tasks. This optimises mission execution by allowing vehicles to swap tasks, add new tasks, or manage malfunctions. Information is shared across the entire squad, as communication allows, but the decentralised autonomy ensures vehicles operate even in comms-denied environments.
Neptune is built on top of our commercially controlled open architecture. A Software Development Kit (SDK) allows integration of third-party vehicles, sensors, autonomy behaviours or signal processing functions. World-wide government and commercial customers have already benefited from this open architecture.
Additional Modules
All of our products are designed to help manage uncrewed maritime systems, ultimately providing situational awareness across all assets within the battlespace. Neptune's additional modules provide real-time analysis and specialist training.
Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) detects mine-like objects from the sidescan sonar data and helps to classify shapes such as cylinders, wedges, and truncated cone shapes. Our embedded ATR uses fast machine learning techniques to run in real-time. Neptune logs all the classified contacts with an image snippet, and can add dynamic reacquire tasks for the next available vehicle in the squad.
Our Neptune simulator can be used to practice skills and rehearse missions to build confidence in the system and evaluate the best way to include the autonomy in your operational workflow. They can also be used by developers to assist with testing. The simulator is provided in a compact rugged Peli case and comprises up to two simulated uncrewed vehicles.
