Autosub-1. Implicatons of using distributed system architectures in AUV development

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) normally consist of a large number of subsystems such as navigation, mission control, propulsion, communications and data logging which need to be linked together to form a complete working system. The traditional approach has been to use point to point connections between these subsystems, or to use one large central computer which would take the data from all the vehicle sensors and send control signals out to all the actuators. Both of these approaches would entail the use of a large complex wiring looms. These are both difficult to modify and upgrade when additional sensors or subsystems need to be added and suffer from the increased likelihood of connector failure. This paper describes an alternative networked distributed architecture approach that has been used on the Autosub-1 AUV