A real-time control architecture for a semi-autonomous underwater vehicle

This paper describes a real-time control architecture for DUSAUV (Dual Use Semi-Autonomous Underwater Vehicle), which has been developed at Korea Research Institute of Ships & Ocean Engineering (KRISO) for being a test-bed to develop underwater navigation and manipulator technologies. DUSAUV has three built-in computers, seven thrusters for 6 DOF motion control, one 4-function electric manipulator, one ballasting motor, embedded power source, and other complementary sensors. A supervisor control system with a GUI and a multi-purpose joystick is mounted on a surface vessel and communicates with the underwater vehicle through a fiber optic link. Further-more, QNX, one of real-time operating system, is ported on the built-in control and navigation computers for real-time control purpose, while Microsoft OS product is ported in the supervisor computer for GUI programming convenience. A hierarchical control architecture, which consists of application layer, real-time layer and physical layer, has been developed for efficient control system of the complex underwater robotic system. This paper also presents the experimenttal results with implementation of the layered control architecture for various motion control of DUSAUV in a basin of KRISO is also presented.