A pragmatic software architecture for UUVs

Abstract

This paper describes the software control architecture that is being used at Florida Atlantic University for the autonomous underwater vehicles, Ocean Voyager II, and Ocean Explorer series. The architecture comprises of several supporting tools including a shared memory management system, a data logger, a monitor, various types of arbiters, and several managers to handle scheduling. One of the goals of the architecture is to automate various functionalities as much as possible and to be able to support the implementation of either a behavioral or hierarchical architecture or a combination of both. The implementation is very flexible, easy to understand, yet powerful enough to support the development of software for real-time autonomous robotic systems.