Title: Autonomous Reactive Mission Scheduling and Task-Path Planning Architecture for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle,
Abstract: An Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) should carry out complex tasks in a
limited time interval. Since existing AUVs have limited battery capacity and
restricted endurance, they should autonomously manage mission time and the
resources to perform effective persistent deployment in longer missions. Task
assignment requires making decisions subject to resource constraints, while
tasks are assigned with costs and/or values that are budgeted in advance. Tasks
are distributed in a particular operation zone and mapped by a waypoint covered
network. Thus, design an efficient routing-task priority assign framework
considering vehicle's availabilities and properties is essential for increasing
mission productivity and on-time mission completion. This depends strongly on
the order and priority of the tasks that are located between node-like
waypoints in an operation network. On the other hand, autonomous operation of
AUVs in an unfamiliar dynamic underwater and performing quick response to
sudden environmental changes is a complicated process. Water current
instabilities can deflect the vehicle to an undesired direction and perturb
AUVs safety. The vehicle's robustness to strong environmental variations is
extremely crucial for its safe and optimum operations in an uncertain and
dynamic environment. To this end, the AUV needs to have a general overview of
the environment in top level to perform an autonomous action selection (task
selection) and a lower level local motion planner to operate successfully in
dealing with continuously changing situations. This research deals with
developing a novel reactive control architecture to provide a higher level of
decision autonomy for the AUV operation that enables a single vehicle to
accomplish multiple tasks in a single mission in the face of periodic
disturbances in a turbulent and highly uncertain environment.