Dupire, Benoit Francois.

The Morpheus, the latest generation of AUV developed at Florida Atlantic University was designed to be as modular as possible, and to handle longer, more complicated missions. The software must now reflect this improvement: it should be as dynamic as possible, must adapt to the different missions and emphasize flexibility and scalability. It must allow for complex behaviors, failure detection and handling and multiple cooperative missions. On the other hand, the new high-level controller has to remain accessible to the non expert user. To achieve these goals, a new architecture, based on the Convenient Hierarchical Autonomous State Machine formalism, was implemented using Python. The system is modeled as a set of concurrent processes communicating through shared memory to accommodate a variety of sensor payloads from one mission to the next. New control tools can be integrated dynamically into the architecture in the form of modules implementing new behaviors.