Mission Control for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles: functional requirements and basic system design

In this paper, the principal functionalities required to the Mission Control module of marine robots will be drafted, focusing on the design and implementation of a high level control architecture layer. This layer has to allow the handling of different event types, permitting also the definition and execution of mission plans for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs). In the proposed solution, an improvement to the already existing control architecture for the family of CNR-ISSIA unmanned marine vehicles (UMVs) extends the system capabilities, completing the interface between the continuous-time layer and event-driver modules.