Mission management and control of BSA-AUV for ocean survey

This paper presents the design, implementation and real world evaluation of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The mission of the vehicle is to carry out an ocean survey in dynamic, partially unknown and unsafe environment, and subject to constraints on the operations. It is a multi-area and multi-sensor-type survey mission which is appropriate for a large range ocean survey to obtain different parameters in different objective areas. The main work in this project is the novel design and development of a hierarchical on-board architecture of the AUV. The architecture is specified by increasingly detailed Petri nets (PN) under the agent-based distributed autonomous control structure. A number of agents have been used in the architecture for mission management and control. Communications and cooperation between agents are realised. The management and control of the mission is modelled by discrete events driven PN formalism. The highest level PN and lower sub-PNs with designed events are described in detail. The designed vehicle has been tested in real world experiments, a lake trial, to evaluate its performance. The feasibility and effectiveness of the architecture is proven in the lake trials in nominal and degraded situations. ⺠This paper presents the design and implementation of an autonomous underwater vehicle. ⺠That makes an ocean survey in dynamic, partially known and unsafe environment. ⺠A real world evaluation of the designed vehicle is carried out when it is subjected to constraints on the operations. ⺠The hierarchical on-board architecture of the underwater vehicle is novel and main part of the new developments in the paper. ⺠The architecture is specified by increasing detailed Petri nets under agent-based distributed autonomous control structure.