MCL: A MISSION CONTROL LANGUAGE FOR AUVS

This paper presents the design and implementation of a Mission Control System (MCS) for an AUV. The mission is easily described using an imperative-like Mission Control Language named MCL, that allows for sequential/parallel, conditional/unconditional and iterative task execution. MCL can be automatically compiled into a Petri net, to formally describe the mission thread of execution. Then the MCS executes the Petri net in real-time over an architecture abstraction layer that communicates with a particular control architecture using a set of custom defined actions and events.