Hierarchical agent-based command and control system for autonomous underwater vehicles

Abstract

Over the past decades, the design and development of mission based Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) continues to challenge researchers. Although AUV technology has matured and commercial systems have appeared in the market, a generic yet robust AUV command and control (C2) system still remains a key research area. This paper presents a command and control system architecture for modular AUVs. We particularly focus on the design and development of a generic control and software architecture for a single modular AUV while allowing natural extensions to multi-vehicle scenarios. This proposed C2 system has a hybrid modular-hierarchical control architecture. It adopts top-down approach in mission level decision making and task planning while utilizing bottom-up approach for navigational control, obstacle avoidance and vehicle fault detection. Each level consists of one or more autonomous agent components handling different C2 tasks. This structure provides the vehicle developers with an explicit view of the clearly defined control responsibilities at different level of control hierarchy. The resultant C2 system is currently operational on the STARFISH AUV built at the ARL of the National University of Singapore. It has successfully executed some autonomous missions during sea trials carried out around the Singapore coastal area.

Service-oriented agent architecture for unmanned air vehicles

“…Subsequent scenarios will include multi-vehicle configurations. 4. To extend the tests to on-air trials with realscale prototypes.…”

“…These approaches generally assign an agent to a functional system module (navigator, pilot, vision processor, etc.). Thus, the agents are defined as key components of the infrastructure that supports the system [1][2][3][4][5][6][7].…”

Proposal of an Automated Mission Manager for Cooperative Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

“…The ASACS architecture focused on the control at the vehicle level, and included a plan dispatch subsystem, also called captain in the proposal, responsible for activating the items from the mission plan, that is, the tasks (or actions) that are part of it. This work has been used as a reference for other architectures, like the hybrid Command and Control (C2) architecture proposed in [25,26]. In this later work, the authors borrowed "captain" idea from the ASACS proposal, and included it at the supervisory level of a three-layer architecture, being responsible for the start, coordination, supervision and control of the execution of the mission.…”

Hierarchical multi-agent command and control system for autonomous underwater vehicles

“…Our previous work [7] adopted a similar approach and high level mission tasks were handled by only two agents at the Supervisory level. This has suffered from the "fat" agent problem where one agent is overloaded with various tasks and resulted in reliability and maintainability issues.…”