A decoupled, distributed AUV control architecture

Current work on undersea vehicles at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics concentrates on the development of terrain-aided navigation techniques, sensor fusion and vehicle control architectures for real-time platform control. Accurate position and attitude estimation and control methods use information from scanning sonar to complement a limited vehicle dynamic model and unobservable environmental disturbances. In this paper we present the vehicle control architecture currently running on the Oberon submersible. This architecture is based on the Distributed Architecture for Mobile Navigation. We use a distributed, decoupled control paradigm to facilitate the tuning of individual control modes. A number of behaviours have been created to direct the motion of the vehicle. We show that when coupled with a low-level terrain-aided navigation scheme, effective control of the vehicle can be achieved.