Command, control, and navigation experimental results with the NPS ARIES AUV

Provides an overview of the Naval Postgraduate School ARIES autonomous underwater vehicle and its control and navigation. An attempt is made to highlight its current operational capabilities and provide a description of future enhancements for greater mission utility and flexibility. An overview of the vehicle design along with descriptions of all major hardware components and sensors is given. A major discussion of the implementation of a modular, multirate, multiprocess software architecture for the ARIES is provided. The architecture is designed to operate using either a single computer processor or two independent, cooperating processors linked through a network interface for improved load balancing. A dual computer implementation is presented since each processor assumes different tasks for mission operation. Also included is a section on the underwater navigation method using a real-time extended Kalman filter that fuses all sensor data and computes the real time position, orientation and velocity. Experimental results for navigational accuracy using a DGPS/IMU/Doppler-aided navigation system are presented with DGPS pop-up maneuvers. Navigational accuracy is a requirement for the use of ARIES as a mobile communications network node. This work provides some examples of missions possible with such a node and the current state of its command and control system.