Autosub-1. A distributed approach to navigation and control of an autonomous underwater vehicle

The paper describes the design, development, implementation, and testing of the navigation and control systems of the Autosub-1 autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), which has been developed by the Ocean Technology Division of Southampton Oceanography Centre. Navigation is based upon acquisition of a Global Positioning System (GPS) fix when the vehicle is surfaced, and dead reckoning when dived. Depth, altitude, position and speed are controlled using separate, networked control nodes. A mission control node, acting as an event-driven command interpreter for the mission script, issues control demands to these control nodes. The system is novel in the use of a fully distributed networked system architecture. The paper discusses the benefit of this architecture to the implementation and testing of the control system. Results of recent trials are presented, concentrating on the vehicle diving, depth, heading and speed control.