Underwater experiments using a reactive system for autonomous vehicles

摘要

This paper describes a situated reasoning architecture, originally used with ground mobile robots, which is shown to easily integrate control theoretic algorithms, navigation heuristics and human supervision for semiautonomous robot control in underwater field environments. The control architecture produces reaction plans that exploit low-level competences as operators. The low-level competences include both obstacle avoidance heuristics and control-theoretic algorithms for generating and following a velocity/acceleration trajectory. Experiments with an undersea remotely-piloted robot in a test tank at the Deep Submergence Laboratory at Woods Hole, MA are described. The robot performed both pilot-aided and autonomous exploration tasks robustly during normal changes in the task environment. The architecture was implemented in the GAPPS/REX situated automata programming language. The guaranteed constant cycle time of the synchronous REX circuits allowed for rapid tuning of the parameters of the control-theoretic and heuristic algorithms to obtaln smooth, safe motion.