Mission management and control of BSA-AUV for ocean survey

► This paper presents the design and implementation of an autonomous underwater vehicle. ► That makes an ocean survey in dynamic, partially known and unsafe environment. ► A real world evaluation of the designed vehicle is carried out when it is subjected to constraints on the operations. ► The hierarchical on-board architecture of the underwater vehicle is novel and main part of the new developments in the paper. ► The architecture is specified by increasing detailed Petri nets under agent-based distributed autonomous control structure.