Providing real-time data trajectory access in autonomous underwater vehicles

The increasingly complex missions for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) require that AUVs be able to make real time decisions not only based on the state information of the mission, but also data collected earlier in the mission. This paper describes the VarMap system on the FAU/USF Ocean Explorer (OEX) AUV systems, which provides a real-time accessible database of all the data collected during the mission from preselected sensors. VarMap constantly monitors a user-defined set of shared-memory variables, logging their values into its database, and allowing other modules to obtain the value of a monitored shared-memory variable at a previous position or time. The efficient data storage and retrieval mechanisms provided by the VarMap systems make it possible to perform complex AUV missions involving feature-based navigation, adaptive sampling, gradient search, etc.