Distributed Systems in Control and Navigation of Small Underwater Vehicles

Distributed systems are pervasive in the process industry but less so in underwater robotics. Development of open-source frameworks, targeted at mobile systems, increases applicability of distributed techniques in vehicle control. Most often supervisory control is implemented in a distributed framework while low-level control is kept in the embedded system. This approach allows sharing of sensor data, logging and increased reconfigurability of high level controllers. Meantime, the embedded system offers precise timing and reliable behaviour. Alternatively, the low-level control can be moved into the distributed framework to allow easier reconfiguration and prototyping. In this paper we describe the architecture used for low-level control and analyze its performance in the MOOS and ROS distributed frameworks.