Design of Autonomous Control System for Underwater Vehicles

This paper designs an autonomous control system for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), which are increasingly important for maritime applications since they avoid the risks of systems requiring a human operator on board. By functioning pre- and online mission planning, trajectory planning, state monitoring, mode switching and auto-piloting, the autonomous control system we designed enables AUV accomplishing its missions autonomously, and it can deal with unexpected events during mission execution. Firstly, a graph based problem formulation is built up in order to express mission specifications easily. Then the architecture of the autonomous control system is presented and the detailed implementation methodologies of each subsystem are described. Furthermore, a mission planning algorithm based on genetic algorithm (MPGA) is presented to realize the core subsystem. Finally, the experiments show that our autonomous control system can be applied in AUV for sea bottom exploration.