An application of a generalized architecture to an autonomous underwater vehicle

Abstract

A common feature of unmanned vehicles is their complexity, which grows apace and provides its own challenges. Frameworks for managing this growing complexity have always been one of the key aspects of designing an unmanned vehicle. In our previous work, a generalized architecture is proposed to not only address the complexity in developing an unmanned vehicle, but also support the algorithm exchange and technology transfer for integrating efforts from different researchers. In this paper, we applied this architecture to the control system of a practical vehicle. In the development of the control system, object oriented method is adopted and the specialization process of element classes from abstract to detail is presented. Then standards for the architecture is discussed. Finally, field experiments are carried out to validate the effectiveness of this architecture.