Mission Control of the Marius Autonomous Underwater Vehicle: System Design, Implementation and Sea Trials

This paper describes the design and implementation of a mission control system for the MARIUS autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The framework adopted for system design builds on the key concept of vehicle primitive, which is a parametrized specification of an elementary operation performed by the vehicle. Vehicle primitives are obtained by coordinating the execution of a number of concurrent system tasks, which are parametrized specifications of classes of algorithms or procedures that implement basic functionalities in an underwater robotic system. Vehicle primitives are in turn logically and temporally chained to form more abstract mission procedures, which are executed as determined by mission programs, in reaction to external events. System task design is carried out using well-established tools from continuous- or discrete-time dynamic system theory, and finite-state automata to describe their logical (event-based) interaction with vehicle primitives. The design and analysis of vehicle primitives ...