Development of a system architecture for an advanced autonomous underwater vehicle, ORCA

Recently, great improvements have been made in developing autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) using stateof- the-art technologies for various kinds of sophisticated underwater missions. To meet increasing demands posed on AUVs, a powerful on-board computer system and an accurate sensor system with an well-organized control system architecture are needed. In this paper, a new control system architecture is proposed for AUV, ORCA (Oceanic Reinforced Cruising Agent) which is being currently developed by Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering (KRISO). The proposed architecture uses a hybrid architecture that combines a hierarchical architecture and a behavior based control architecture with an evaluator for coordinating between the architectures. This paper also proposed a sensor fusion structure based on the definition of 4 categories of sensors called grouping and 5-step data processing procedure. The development of the AUV, ORCA involving the system architecture, vehicle layout, and hardware configuration of on-board system are described.