Research on hierarchical control architecture for autonomous underwater vehicle

With the development of autonomous underwater vehicle (short for AUV) technology, there is increasing demand of its autonomy. The paper researches on control architecture for AUV. After described hybrid property of the control system of AUV, we present hierarchical control architecture for AUV, which has been organized in three layers: mission layer, task layer and execution layer. State supervisor and task coordinator are two key modules to handle discrete events, so these two layers were described in detail. Details are given of a series of tests applying to validate the feasibility and practicability of the architecture design. The tests results show that AUV can perform mission autonomously, effectively, and safely.