Talking autonomous vehicles: Automatic AUV mission analysis in natural language

As AUVs are enabled with greater levels of autonomy, there is the need for them to clearly explain their actions and reasoning, maintaining a level of situation awareness and operator trust. Here, we describe the REGIME system that automatically generates natural language updates in real-time as well as post-mission reports. Specifically, the system takes time-series sensor data, mission logs, together with mission plans as its input, and generates descriptions of the missions in natural language. These natural language updates can be used in isolation or as an add-on to existing interfaces such as SeeByte's SeeTrack common operator interface. A usability study reflects the high situation awareness induced by the system, as well as interest in future use.