An Optimized, Data Distribution Service-Based Solution for Reliable Data Exchange Among Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Abstract

Major challenges are presented when managing a large number of heterogeneous vehicles that have to communicate underwater in order to complete a global mission in a cooperative manner. In this kind of application domain, sending data through the environment presents issues that surpass the ones found in other overwater, distributed, cyber-physical systems (i.e., low bandwidth, unreliable transport medium, data representation and hardware high heterogeneity). This manuscript presents a Publish/Subscribe-based semantic middleware solution for unreliable scenarios and vehicle interoperability across cooperative and heterogeneous autonomous vehicles. The middleware relies on different iterations of the Data Distribution Service (DDS) software standard and their combined work between autonomous maritime vehicles and a control entity. It also uses several components with different functionalities deemed as mandatory for a semantic middleware architecture oriented to maritime operations (device and service registration, context awareness, access to the application layer) where other technologies are also interweaved with middleware (wireless communications, acoustic networks). Implementation details and test results, both in a laboratory and a deployment scenario, have been provided as a way to assess the quality of the system and its satisfactory performance.

Survey of Mission Planning and Management Architectures for Underwater Cooperative Robotics Operations

“…The primary goal of the SWARMs project [66] is to expand the use of underwater and surface vehicles (AUVs, ROVs, USVs) to facilitate the conception, planning and execution of maritime and offshore operations and missions. As part of this project a semantic middleware architecture has been defined, implemented [67], and validated with simulations and real scenarios [68][69][70]. Figure 16 shows a detailed functional description of the components that constitute the aforementioned architecture.…”

Proposal of an Automated Mission Manager for Cooperative Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

“…In order to have a better grasp of the proposed mission manager, we will introduce an overview of the SWARMs architecture [21] in this section, paying special attention to the used components and information models. Figure 1 shows an overview of the SWARMs architecture.…”

“…It uses a publish/subscribe paradigm for data communications, generating and managing a collection of DDS topics. A detailed description of how DDS communications are managed in SWARMs is given at [21].…”

“…The purpose of this paper is to propose a new mission manager component designed and developed for the SWARMs middleware [21] as part of the efforts of the SWARMs European research project [22]. This mission manager has been designed and developed to be run in a computer at a control station, and not in the vehicles, using the managing-managed subsystem approach from MAPE-K [23] where the AUVs, as the managed subsystems, have also their own self-adaptive capabilities.…”

“…Among all the components in the SWARMs middleware, the proposed mission manager, called here Missions and Tasks Register and Reporter (MTRR), is the component responsible for the treatment and supervision of all the mission related interactions within the middleware. In a general overview, it is responsible for mediating between a MMT application, used by a human operator to generate the mission plan and supervise the mission progress, and a DDS [41] used as the paradigm of communications with the vehicles participating in a mission [21]. In the middleware, the MTRR interacts with the Semantic Query from the high-level services block, with the Publish/Subscription Manager component from the Data Management and with all the three reporter components from the Low-level Services block.…”