Proposal of an Automated Mission Manager for Cooperative Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Néstor Lucas Martínez,Zhaoyu Zhai,José-Fernán Martínez-Ortega,Jesús Rodríguez-Molina

doi:10.3390/app10030855

Néstor Lucas Martínez, Zhaoyu Zhai + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/app10030855

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Journal: Applied sciences	Publication Date: Jan 25, 2020
Citations: 7	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Abstract

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in the use of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for ocean interventions. Typical operations imply the pre-loading of a pre-generated mission plan into the AUV before being launched. Once deployed, the AUV waits for a start command to begin the execution of the plan. An onboard mission manager is responsible for handling the events that may prevent the AUV from following the plan. This approach considers the management of the mission only at the vehicle level. However, the use of a mission-level manager in coordination with the onboard mission manager could improve the handling of exogenous events that cannot be handled fully at the vehicle level. Moreover, the use of vehicle virtualization by the mission-level manager can ease the use of older AUVs. In this paper, we propose a new mission-level manager to be run at a control station. The proposed mission manager, named Missions and Task Register and Reporter (MTRR), follows a decentralized hierarchical control pattern for self-adaptive systems, and provides a basic virtualization in regard to the AUV’s planning capabilities. The MTRR has been validated as part of the SWARMs European project. During the final trials we assessed its effectiveness and measured its performance. As a result, we have identified a strong correlation between the length of mission plan and the time required to start a mission ( ρ s = 0.79 , n = 45 , p 0.001 ). We have also identified a possible bottleneck when accessing the repositories for storing the information from the mission. Specifically, the average time for storing the received state vectors in the relational database represented only 18.50% of the average time required for doing so in the semantic repository.

Highlights

The use of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for marine interventions has attracted increasing interest in recent years from ocean scientists, marine industries and the military [1,2,3].the use of this kind of robotic system for underwater operations faces a series of challenges that include: the power required to operate them, the constrained nature of underwater communications, the limited perception capabilities of the aforementioned systems, the lack of an underwater positioning system, and the reduced scope of existing underwater maps and the need for autonomous adaption to achieve a certain degree of delegation [1].Appl
The AUV is transferred to the launching point, and once it is deployed on the sea surface, it is kept idle until the reception of the start command to begin the mission [2,6]
We have identified that the access to the databases, and the semantic repository, are possible bottlenecks during the operation, and that there is a strong correlation between the mission plan length and the time required to start a mission

Summary

Introduction

The use of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for marine interventions has attracted increasing interest in recent years from ocean scientists, marine industries and the military [1,2,3].the use of this kind of robotic system for underwater operations faces a series of challenges that include: the power required to operate them, the constrained nature of underwater communications, the limited perception capabilities of the aforementioned systems, the lack of an underwater positioning system, and the reduced scope of existing underwater maps and the need for autonomous adaption to achieve a certain degree of delegation [1].Appl. The use of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for marine interventions has attracted increasing interest in recent years from ocean scientists, marine industries and the military [1,2,3]. The use of this kind of robotic system for underwater operations faces a series of challenges that include: the power required to operate them, the constrained nature of underwater communications, the limited perception capabilities of the aforementioned systems, the lack of an underwater positioning system, and the reduced scope of existing underwater maps and the need for autonomous adaption to achieve a certain degree of delegation [1]. This latter delegation challenge has usually been tackled by defining a sequence of tasks assigned to an AUV, and known as a mission plan [4,5]. The full mission plan is typically loaded into the AUVs to be launched, either from an onshore facility or a support vessel. The AUV is transferred to the launching point, and once it is deployed on the sea surface, it is kept idle until the reception of the start command to begin the mission [2,6]

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