Software design techniques for the man machine interface to a complex underwater vehicle

As underwater vehicle complexity grows, so does the manpower needed to operate and maintain them. This paper describes the architecture of the software used to operate FOSS (Fiber-Optic Survey System), a complex full ocean depth towed vehicle. This system operates using the UNIX operating system and the X Windows graphical user interface. It is in constant serial communication with 25 different devices both on the vehicle itself and in the shipboard control van, providing centralized control as well as automatic fault detection, enhancing vehicle reliability while reducing operator workload, and thus significantly lowering operational costs. The paper explains the distributed architecture used to continually monitor over 70 analog channels, including leak detectors, current sensors, voltage sensors, and ground fault detectors, and the techniques used to provide immediate warnings to the operator when any signal falls outside of allowed parameters. Also detailed is: how the system manages and catalogs the media used by the vehicle´s 2 electronic still cameras, 4 subsea video cameras, and the side-scan sonar; providing centralized indication of the recording time remaining for each system; logs of the media recorded; and even printed labels. The paper describes the techniques used to receive data from the various sensors, and redistribute it in proper format to all other systems, thus continually tagging all data streams with time, date, vehicle and ship position, vehicle attitude, water temperature, and transmissometer data