Design, Development, and Testing of a Mission Control System for the MARIUS AUV

This paper describes the design, development, and sea testing of a Mission Control System for the MARIUS Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). The design methodology builds on the key concept of Vehicle Primitive, which is a parameterized specification of an elementary operation performed by the vehicle. A Vehicle Primitive is obtained by coordinating the execution of a number of concurrent System Tasks. Vehicle Primitives are activated to form Mission Procedures, which are executed as determined by Mission Programs, and in reaction to external events. System Task design is carried out using well established tools from continuous/discrete-time dynamic system theory, and finite state automata to describe its logical interaction with Vehicle Primitives. The design and analysis of Vehicle Primitives and Mission Procedures build on the theory of Petri nets, which are naturally oriented towards the modeling and analysis of asynchronous, discrete event systems with concurrency. Vehicle Primitives and Mission Procedures are developed and implemented in the vehicle’s computer system using the specially designed software programming environments named CORAL and ATOL, respectively. The first is a set of software tools that allows for graphically building a library of Vehicle Primitives embodied in Petri nets, and running them in real-time. The latter provides similar tools for Mission Procedure programming, but relies on a reactive synchronous programming language as a way to manage the potential complexity introduced by the occurrence of large Petri net structures. The paper provides a brief summary of the theoretical issues addressed in the course of designing the Mission Control System for the MARIUS AUV, discusses relevant implementation details, and describes the results of a series of sea tests for system design validation carried out in Sines, Portugal. ∗This work was supported by the Commission of the European Communities under contract MAS2-CT92-0021 of the MAST-II programme, and by the Portuguese PRAXIS programme under contract 3/3.1/TPR/23/94.