Development of a guidance and control system for an underwater plume exploring AUV

In recent years, adaptive and autonomous exploration of underwater plumes with autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) becomes a hot research topic, due to its significant applications. For the researches on AUV underwater plume exploring, design, optimization and validation of the control strategies and autonomous behaviors of the AUVs is the key issue. In order to study various control strategies and behaviors on an AUV platform, a stable and reliable low-level guidance and control system should be first designed. In this paper, we proposed a modular behavior-based control architecture, and addressed the design of the guidance module and kinematic variables control module which are the low-level part of the control architecture for an underwater plume exploring AUV. Simulation examples are presented, which demonstrate the good performance of the developed guidance and kinematic variables control system.