Recent trends in control architectures for autonomous underwater vehicles

This article describes therecenttrends in controlarchitectures for autonomous vehicles. The study has been carried out on 22 architectures, most of which relate to the field of underwater robotics. The main aim of this article is to show the relationships between these various architectures and to show how developments in architectures for autonomous land vehicles have been extended for use in autonomous underwater vehicles. A summary of important features of the 22 architectures is presented and a new hybrid architecture is proposed for the underwater vehicle GARBI.