A dynamically configurable architecture for the control of autonomous underwater vehicles

This paper presents a control architecture for autonomous underwater vehicles AUVs. The proposed architecture has its foundations on a hierarchic structure organized linguistically where parallel operations take place in real-time. this hierarchic structure is composed of three levels: organization, coordination and functional layer, structured according to the principle of increasing precision with decreasing intelligence. The main contribution is the concept of dynamically configurable architecture where the notion of architecture coordinator plays a crucial role. This system dynamically configures the connections among modules of the functional and maintains the state of this configuration so that the most adequate translation of planned actions into execution commands takes place. These coordination features are also used to incorporate the emergence of reactive behaviours in this hierarchic architecture. >