Onboard system of hybrid underwater robotic vehicles: Integrated software architecture and control algorithm

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, a hybrid underwater robotic vehicle (HURV), which combines the advantages of autonomous underwater vehicle and remotely operated vehicle, is introduced. The vehicle system consists of an onboard system with a set of embedded PC/104 computers and a surface monitoring station based on the client–server supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. Correspondingly, a two-layer software architecture composed of a monitoring layer and a task layer is presented, and they are inserted into the surface and onboard systems, respectively. The task layer includes four kinds of tasks — perception task, communication task, motion control task and fault treatment task. Subsequently, the design and implementation for multiple tasks running in the task layer are described in detail. Furthermore, under the above software architecture, a model-free fuzzy proportional–integral–derivative (FPID) controller is applied to heading control task at different speed profiles, in consideration of the simplified implementation on the PC/104 computer. Numerical simulation results quantitatively illustrate the designed FPID controller performs better than the classic PID controller, especially in the rise time, settling time, and overshot. Finally, tank experiments are performed to test the performance of the entire onboard system of the developed HURV with the integrated software architecture and FPID control algorithm.