Intelligent AUV on-board health monitoring software (INDOS)

Two aspects of situation analysis are of special importance in the operation of autonomous underwater vehicles: on the one hand, maintenance of system integrity and, on the other hand, identification of danger situations and appropriate reactions (e.g. collision avoidance), or more generally early detection of potential failures and provision of intelligent countermeasures. The efforts with regard to fault avoidance are centred on the two functions system health and mission management. It is mainly in these domains that fault detection, diagnosis and recovery are necessary, since the occurrence of a fault or failure could have dramatic consequences for the vehicle's safety and performance. Any degradation in the peformance of the system has to be detected as soon as possible as otherwise the vehicle controller would operate on the basis of abnormal and non-realistic measurement data. Consequently software development for AUVs at STN ATLAS is currently focussed on intelligent behaviour. In the case of the STN ATLAS AUV development "C-Cat", this complex is handled by the intelligent software INDOS.