Software Control Architecture for the BOSS Manta Ray AUV Actuation System

Abstract

The growing demand for underwater research and exploration requires new approaches to building underwater vehicles. The state-of-the-art technologies are expensive, provide limited operation time and/or manoeuvrability. New approaches based on bio-locomotion are a promising area of research allowing to increase the power efficiency of the propulsion system and increase ability of the underwater robots to manoeuvre in complex environments such as deep-water installations or coral reefs. This paper presents a design of the actuation system of BOSS Manta Ray AUV. The design of the vehicle differs significantly from the common approaches, such as torpedo-like AUVs. The vehicle belongs to the class of bionic vehicles implementing ideas taken from nature in order to investigate the capabilities of the propulsion system. This paper discusses the software architecture for controlling the vehicle actuator system.