Advanced Real-time Mission Management for an AUV

This paper presents ProCoSA, an environment developed at ONERA for implementing advanced mission management in autonomous vehicles. The rst part describes the motivations and the main features of Pro-CoSA. The second part presents an example of application on the AUV REDERMOR at DCE/GESMA. The name ProCoSA is an acronym for the French title Programmation et Conduite de Systtmes Autonomes whose translation in English is Programming and Execution Monitoring of Autonomous Systems. ProCoSA is a software which includes a graphic user interface (GUI) for oo-line mission preparation on PC or unix computer, and a non mission speciic execution monitoring software which runs on the vehicle on-board computer. ProCoSA was designed during a basic research on closed loop planning supported by the French Defense DGA/DRET. Its rst implementation was carried out at ONERA in 1993, in the department of Control which has a research program in mobile robotics. Several enhancements, with the support of French Defence Technical Services, and a complete new implementation make ProCoSA a reliable software. A detailed documentation can be found on the web : A-Main features High level autonomy of unmanned vehicle is the ability to adapt the mission plan to cope with unexpected events. This implies the ability to change all or parts of the mission plan during mission execution. For a limited complexity implementation, the system software should feature : graphic based mission plan language, so that an human operator can easily express mission speciica-tions. During mission execution, and when there exist a communication link from the autonomous vehicle to the operator interface, the same language allows the current mission state to be displayed on the graphic mission representation, hierarchical and procedural programming of mission : a plan is a partially ordered set of macro-actions. A macro-action is a particular behavior which can be considered as a submission , and is described as such. The hierarchical representation simpliies the mission plan design as well as its graphic representation changes in mission plans without recompilation : a mission plan refers to behaviors which themselves refer to behaviors and to functionalities. Function-alities are attached to the vehicle components: ac-tuators, sensors, and also data processing resources. Changes in mission plans concern only the way behaviors are requested; functionalities are never mod-iied during a mission execution. easy addition or customization of mission plans behaviors : when no functionality has to be modiied, changing a behavior speciication should be feasible by …