Handling unanticipated events in single and multiple AUV systems

An intelligent controller for AUVs must be able to handle unanticipated events as they occur, If not, it risks the mission and the vehicle. Unfortunately, this is a difficult, context-dependent task: the agent must first detect that there has been an event, then diagnose it, assess its likely importance, and finally select an appropriate response and integrate that response into its other actions. Event handling is even more difficult in situations involving multiple cooperating AUVs, since now the agent must analyze the event in terms of its likely impact on the others and the group as a whole. In this paper, the authors discuss two versions of event handling in Orca, a schema-based AUV controller for ocean science and cooperative distributed problem solving missions. The authors then discuss how the process can be extended for multiagent event handling