A COMMON CONTROL LANGUAGE TO SUPPORT MULTIPLE COOPERATING AUVS

The following paper describes the development and current state of a “Common Control Language” (CCL) for autonomous undersea vehicle (AUV) monitoring and control. The CCL is a protocol that will provide a means for different AUVs and their users to communicate a common set of commands and information between one another. It is specifically tailored for AUV platforms and the underwater domain. Recent efforts in developing the language have consisted of refining the AUV basic behavior interface and implementing an interpreter for CCL on board the Solarpowered AUV (SAUV). The interpreter receives CCL task definitions and translates them into active processes that will execute the directives. These processes are instantiated and maintained using the distributed control environment (DICE). The CCL directives have been highly structured to capture the various aspects of basic behaviors which make sense when interfacing with an AUV. In addition, messaging using CCL has been kept to a minimum reducing the acoustic transmissions to a few bytes We also summarize the recent AUVFest 2005 operational event where many of the critical pieces of our CCL architecture were field tested. These include a next generation SAUV controller which is being modified to use the DICE framework and the CCL interpreter as well as the mission planning and monitoring tools required to task and monitor the group of AUVs.