Contents I. Introduction
Field experimentation is an important phase of the unmanned vehicle systems life cycle. First, the unmanned vehicles field is relatively new, but it is evolving quite fast, especially in some categories. Second, the distribution of cost across acquisition, operation, and support categories differs significantly from that of manned vehicles, making it difficult to transfer procedures and techniques used for manned vehicles to the unmanned vehicles field. Third, new concepts of operation, namely those involving coordination and cooperation of unmanned vehicle systems are still being developed, ([4], [9], [18]), and this cannot be done without an appropriate integration and evaluation framework. For example, the economics of coordination and cooperation of unmanned vehicle systems is still poorly understood. Fourth, a significant percentage of commercially available unmanned vehicles are closed systems, thus precluding integration and experimentation with heterogeneous vehicles. Field experimentation is even more difficult with ocean going vehicles. This is because access to the ocean is very expensive and highly dependent on weathersea conditions. Collaborative experimentation is part of the answer to this problem. Once ships and other support assets are at sea, concurrent experiments can be typically supported for several weeks. In addition, multiple assets from different institutions coming from different countries can be tested in an integrated fashion and on a scale that is not typically accessible to any institution working in isolation. This is the main motivation behind the Rapid Environmental Picture (REP) exercise jointly organized by the Portuguese Navy and Porto University, through the Laboratorio de Sistemas e Tecnologias Subaquaticas (LSTS), since 2010.
