Application of widget-based consumer programming techniques in autonomous marine vehicle control system design

Abstract

Modern autonomous surface and underwater vehicles are becoming increasingly advanced and are equipped with a rich and diverse set of sensors and control algorithms. Diversity of missions the vehicles are used in as well as diversity of their deployments (alone, in fleet) requires frequent redesigns and adaptations of their control systems. Modular programming using tools such as LABVIEW are used in order to facilitate faster redesign. Consumer programming is a branch of computing that focuses on developing highly expressive programming methods easily understandable to users without formal education in programming. Widgets or web widgets are used as building blocks for applications. The consumer can develop his own data flows using programming-by-example method on graphical user interfaces of widgets. This paper proposes application of consumer programming methods for designing control systems of marine vehicles. All vehicles, sensors, control blocks and additional processing blocks are offered to user as widgets that can be connected to form a complex application. Application of Web technologies enables usage of various remote resources over the Internet, potentially improving the quality of the mission being performed. Issues such as unpredictable delays and possibilities for connection loss that are introduced by application of web technologies are identified and a solution for them is proposed.