On AUV control architecture

This paper surveys control architectures proposed in the literature and describes a control architecture that is being developed for a semi-autonomous underwater vehicle for intervention missions (SAUVIM) at the Universip of Hawaii. Conceived as hybrid, this architecture has been organized in three Layers: Planning, Control and Execution. The mission is planned with a sequence of subgoals. Each sub-goal has a related task supervisor responsible for arranging a set of pre-programmed task modules in order to achieve the sub-goal. Task modules are the key concept of the architecture. They are the main building bloch and can be dynamically re-arranged by the task supervisor In our architecture, deliberation takes place at the planning layer while reaction is dealt through the parallel execution of the task modules. Hence, the system presents both a hierarchical and an heterarchical decomposition, being able to show a predictable response while keeping rapid reactivip to the dynamic environment.