Abstract
Major challenges are presented when managing a large number of heterogeneous vehicles that have to communicate underwater in order to complete a global mission in a cooperative manner. In this kind of application domain, sending data through the environment presents issues that surpass the ones found in other overwater, distributed, cyber-physical systems (i.e., low bandwidth, unreliable transport medium, data representation and hardware high heterogeneity). This manuscript presents a Publish/Subscribe-based semantic middleware solution for unreliable scenarios and vehicle interoperability across cooperative and heterogeneous autonomous vehicles. The middleware relies on different iterations of the Data Distribution Service (DDS) software standard and their combined work between autonomous maritime vehicles and a control entity. It also uses several components with different functionalities deemed as mandatory for a semantic middleware architecture oriented to maritime operations (device and service registration, context awareness, access to the application layer) where other technologies are also interweaved with middleware (wireless communications, acoustic networks). Implementation details and test results, both in a laboratory and a deployment scenario, have been provided as a way to assess the quality of the system and its satisfactory performance.
Highlights
Several types of underwater operations play an essential role for many players in the maritime sector
As far as underwater and maritime robotics are concerned, this means that Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs), Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs) or Remotely Operated underwater Vehicles (ROVs) will have to find ways to integrate their heterogeneous capabilities to be able to participate in a mission with a common objective
The main issue with this proposal is that it has not been conceived for autonomous maritime vehicles, so as it happens with other ones, its adaptability to the application domain described in this paper is dubious: an AUV or an ASV are very different from the devices that are usually found in an Internet of Things (IoT)-based deployment
Summary
Several types of underwater operations play an essential role for many players in the maritime sector. Improving quality and safety for missions, such as subsea mapping, as well as emergence of new missions which require context awareness and collaboration, can be tackled in a better way with several AUVs. As mentioned before, there are a number of challenges associated with development of advanced AUVs. hardware interoperability is a major issue at the data level, as the autonomous vehicles supposed to interact with each other may not be able to do so if they send information that cannot be comprehended by a vehicle not manufactured by the same company. Hardware interoperability is a major issue at the data level, as the autonomous vehicles supposed to interact with each other may not be able to do so if they send information that cannot be comprehended by a vehicle not manufactured by the same company This manuscript puts forward a system aimed to solve these issues (information exchange in constrained environments, hardware interoperability among vehicles from different manufacturers, different data formats representations, etc.) through the usage of middleware for maritime vehicles. It will be possible to overcome all those difficulties and guarantee data transfer among the elements implied in the deployment
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