Control Systems Architecture, Navigation, and Communication Research Using the NPS Phoenix Underwater Vehicle

While there has always been a need to determine the global position of an underwater vehicle, in some missions involving search, mapping, and intervention with objects, navigation to local area landmarks is more appropriate and precise. All aspects of autonomous search have been of interest to us for some time now, and we have recently developed and extended our robot control system architecture using Prolog as a rule based mission specification language to drive vehicle missions involving motion around targets of interest. In particular, we have studied the use of onboard scanning sonar to perform local area navigation. Additionally, we have installed a new low cost short / long baseline acoustic communications / navigation system called DiveTracker, and are developing filtering software that would combine inputs from several sources having different update rates and levels of precision to produce high update rate navigational information with the precision afforded by the low update rate reference. Also, the DiveTracker system affords a low cost acoustic communications system that can be used for low rate message sending and retrieval from autonomous vehicles.