Control and Supervisory Discrete Event Structures for Autonomous Vehicles in the Underwater Environment

The increasing complexity of the decision-making capability of underwater robotic systems raises important issues. Allowing an operator to define a vehicle mission in high-level language and translate it into a mission plan, and consequently develop appropriate tools to convert a mission plan into an operational mission program appears to be a significant goal in the underwater environment. In addition, equipping the operator with the ability to track the progress of the mission program as it is executed and the ability to modify it if necessary, improves mission performance in the underwater environment. For vehicles used in underwater missions to explore wide unknown areas, this is the main goal that a control architecture must enable. The present paper proposes a supervision system for autonomous underwater vehicles based on timed Petri nets. A detailed literature analysis is presented, assessing some important aspects of the considered topic. A novel modelization solution is proposed, based on suitable compositions of sequence, series and parallel structures.