The aim of the Autosub project is to build fully autonomousunmanned underwater vehicles which can gather data from the deep ocean,diving to full ocean depth. Work is currently being undertaken todevelop vehicle subsystems for a prototype test bed vehicle. Softwaredevelopment for the mission management system, which carries out thenavigation, flight control, fault monitoring and data handlingfunctions, is a major part of this. The data-handling system forscientific payload and housekeeping data is the subject of this paper.The data handling system will be expected to accommodate a wide range ofscientific sensors, some of which will be established sensors whileothers will be experimental. The data from these sensors may be inanalogue or digital format which, in some cases, may require furtherprocessing. In addition housekeeping data from other on-board systemswill need to be accommodated. This data then has to be stored reliably.A subset of this data may also be sent to any of a number of telemetrysystems fitted to the vehicle. The behaviour of the data handling systemwill also change as the mission progresses. Sensors and telemetry may beswitched on or off and the processing applied to the data may change
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