Modular and Reconfigurable System Design for Underwater Vehicles

Abstract

The work on modular and reconfigurable system design aims to improve the usability of underwater vehicles by broadening their versatility and adaptability to new situations and scenarios. This will be achieved by a modular system design on the hardware side and a reconfigurable software system. This is necessary since current design of underwater vehicles is usually tailor-made for a specific task or completely open-frame. While the latter option is more versatile, it is nearly exclusively found in ROV systems, since an open-frame design usually comes with limited hydrodynamic optimizations, requiring strong thrusters and thus a lot of energy which can only be supplied via thether. There are some AUV systems with a modular design, but these designs usually do not incorporate the modules in the vehicles control framework: Additional modules are independent from the main vehicle control and used only for data acquisition.