Design and development of command and control system for autonomous underwater vehicles

Abstract

The proposed command and control (C2) system has a hybrid, modular hierarchical control architecture. It adopts deliberative top-down approach in mission level decision making and task planning while utilizing reactive bottom-up approach for navigational control, obstacle avoidance and vehicle fault detection. The underlying software architecture of the C2 system adopts component and modular based design principle. Every C2 component has its local data structure and implements its own logic without interfering with other components. Such a design has several advantages for component construction and maintainability. All the components have a uniform software interface to facilitate inter-component communication within the AUV via Remote ProceduralCall (RPC). This allows computational load distribution by deploying C2 components onto different processors in the AUV. The component based approach exhibits robustness and adaptability as different components can be configured or exchanged depending on the requirement of mission.