A Programming Architecture for Smart Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are an indispensable tool for marine scientists to study the world's oceans. The Slocum glider is a buoyancy driven AUV designed for missions that can last weeks or even months. Although successful, its hardware and layered control architecture is rather limited and difficult to program. Due to limits in its hardware and software infrastructure, the Slocum glider is not able to change its behavior based on sensor readings while underwater. In this paper, we discuss a new programming architecture for AUVs like the Slocum. We present a new model that allows marine scientists to express AUV missions at a higher level of abstraction, leaving low-level software and hardware details to the compiler and runtime system. The Slocum glider is used as an illustration of how our programming architecture can be implemented within an existing system. The Slocum's new framework consists of an event driven, finite state machine model, a corresponding compiler and runtime system, and a hardware platform that interacts with the glider's existing hardware infrastructure. The new programming architecture is able to implement changes in glider behavior in response to sensor readings while submerged. This crucial capability will enable advanced glider behaviors such as underwater communication and swarming. Experimental results based on simulation and actual glider deployments off the coast of New Jersey show the expressiveness and effectiveness of our prototype implementation.