Autonomous underwater robots with distributed behavior control architecture

This paper describes the design and overall structure of a test-bed system for developing multiple autonomous underwater robot systems. The developed system can be regarded as a multi-agent system which consists of a pair of autonomous underwater robots, named "The Twin-Burger-I and II", an ultrasonic positioning system, and a human diver. An ultrasonic command link system is used for communication among each agents. The distributed vehicle management architecture (DVMA) is applied to the Twin-Burger robot as an architecture for the control software of the robot. Mission execution experiments are carried out in the Institute of Industrial Science (IIS) testing pool. The results show the effectiveness and applicability of the DVMA.