AN UPDATE ON A COMMON CONTROL LANGUAGE TO SUPPORT MULTIPLE COOPERATING AUVS

摘要

The following paper describes the development and current state of a "Common Control Language" (CCL) for autonomous undersea vehicle (AUV) monitoring and control. The CCL is a protocol that will provide a means for different AUVs and their users to communicate a common set of commands and information between one another. It is specifically tailored for AUV platforms and the underwater domain. An interpreter residing on the vehicle receives CCL directives and translates them into active processes that will execute the directives. These processes are instantiated and maintained using the distributed control environment (DICE). The CCL directives have been highly structured to capture various "flavors" of generic behaviors as well as tailored to minimize message size for transmission in the acoustic environment. Recent efforts in developing the language have consisted of updating the language constructs to reflect lessons learned during recent in-water science experiments along with associated modifications to an interpreter for CCL. One such lesson was the need to implement a language directive for updates that would allow changes to current task specifications. This was found to be very useful during experimentation as real-time events prompted adjusting vehicle tasks while not aborting the mission and starting over. To support the ability of future users to incrementally make their vehicles CCL-ready, we outline a layered development approach whereby succeeding framework layers build upon each other providing greater cooperative and autonomy capabilities at the expense of having to modify legacy platform software systems. We close with progress made to date on demonstrating multiple vehicles cooperating using CCL to maintain a persistent survey of a user specified region. This requires development of several critical pieces: the next generation Solar-powered AUV (SAUV) controller is being modified to use the DICE framework and the CCL interpreter; an ad hoc acoustic networking protocol is being developed to maintain connectivity between vehicles; and a mission planner is being developed to allow an operator to adequately plan the cooperative missions as well as monitor status of all vehicles and task the group appropriately.