A data handling and telemetry system for an autonomous underwater vehicle

The aim of the Autosub project is to build fully autonomous unmanned underwater vehicles which can gather data from the deep ocean, diving to full ocean depth. Work is currently being undertaken to develop vehicle subsystems for a prototype test bed vehicle. Software development for the mission management system, which carries out the navigation, flight control, fault monitoring and data handling functions, is a major part of this. The data-handling system for scientific payload and housekeeping data is the subject of this paper. The data handling system will be expected to accommodate a wide range of scientific sensors, some of which will be established sensors while others will be experimental. The data from these sensors may be in analogue or digital format which, in some cases, may require further processing. In addition housekeeping data from other on-board systems will need to be accommodated. This data then has to be stored reliably. A subset of this data may also be sent to any of a number of telemetry systems fitted to the vehicle. The behaviour of the data handling system will also change as the mission progresses. Sensors and telemetry may be switched on or off and the processing applied to the data may change