The Effectiveness of MOOS-IvP based Design of Control System for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles

This paper demonstrates the benefit of using MOOS-IvP in the development of control system for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles(UUV). The demand for autonomy in UUVs has significantly increased due to the complexity in missions to be performed. Furthermore, the increased number of sensors and actuators that are interconnected through a network has introduced a need for a middleware platform for UUVs. In this context, MOOS-IvP, which is an open source software architecture, has been developed by several researchers from MIT, Oxford University, and NUWC. The MOOS software is a communication middleware based on the publish-subscribe architecture allowing each application to communicate through a MOOS database. The IvP Helm, which is one of the MOOS modules, publishes vehicle commands using multi-objective optimization in order to implement autonomous decision making. This paper explores the benefit of MOOS-IvP in the development of control software for UUVs by using a case study with an auto depth control system based on self-organizing fuzzy logic control. The simulation results show that the design and verification of UUV control software based on MOOS-IvP can be carried out quickly and efficiently thanks to the reuse of source codes, modular-based architecture, and the high level of scalability.