An Expert Navigator for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

Abstract

This article describes considerations and design hypothesis in the implementation of the strategy to generate trajectories for an autonomous vehicle. The application problem consists of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) tracking a pipeline in the seabed. To solve this problem, a real time expert system (named EN4AUV) was proposed to be included in the on-board AUV central processing unit. EN4AUV takes trajectory control decisions based on a number of variables, arranged around the concept of scenarios. For different scenarios, the expert system is able to suggest trajectories. Although this work is still undergoing, in this paper some incipient results over computer simulation are shown. The article is concluded with some conclusions and a snapshot of future work.