Mission specification for autonomous underwater vehicles

The user of an autonomous vehicle must have an effective means of expressing a mission for the vehicle. Ideally, the user should only be concerned with expressing what the mission is, with minimal concern about how it will be carried out. One thing that the object-oriented (OO) paradigm is known for is the emphasis being on what is accomplished rather than on how it is accomplished. Various parts of a mission have many things in common, and the object-oriented paradigm also provides inheritance for capturing these commonalities. As such, we believe that an object-oriented approach is ideally suited to mission specification, and have developed a prototype object-oriented mission specification system for an autonomous underwater vehicle. The user specifies several mission phase objects that are combined to form a single mission object. The mission object may then be displayed or executed