Mission planning and specification in the Neptus framework

The C3I (command, control, communication and information) Neptus framework which is being developed at the Underwater Systems and Technology Laboratory (USTL/LSTS) is presented. Neptus is a modular mixed initiative framework (human operators in the control loop) for the operation of heterogeneous teams of vehicles such as autonomous and remotely operated underwater, surface, land, and air vehicles. Neptus is composed of mission and vehicle planning, supervision, and post-mission analysis modules which are provided as services across a network. This paper focus mainly on the mission definition module with the presentation of MDL - a XML based language for mission definition