A generic and modular architecture for maritime autonomous vehicles

摘要

Autonomous systems face the challenge of managing disruptive events such as internal alterations, mission updates and environmental perturbations that always occur in an operational context. Autonomous vehicles must embed the capabilities to supervise their behaviour and to detect and react to such events. The complexity increases with the heterogeneity of vehicles in the team and the communication constraints. This paper describes the Robot System Onboard Architecture (RSOA) software developed in the SWARMs project for the achievement of offshore maritime operations. This generic and modular architecture implements high level capabilities in a semiautonomous or autonomous manner, and is deployed at a lower level on a heterogeneous swarm of vehicles. Target vehicles include autonomous and teleoperated underwater vehicles, and surface vehicles. Simulation and experimentations achieved on the Black Sea in Romania (July 2017) then in the Trondheim fjord in Norway (June 2018) highlighted the good performance of the RSOA.