Issues in Software Architectures for Intelligent Underwater Robots

Abstract

Recently, great progresses in robot technologies have been made from industrial robots to intelligent service robots. With state-of-the-art technologies in materials, sensors, and robotic intelligence, underwater robots have been being developed for various kinds of applications, and their missions are getting more and more complicated when comparedto conventional ones such as a hydrographic survey which is a simple and one-way data collecting. As increasing demandsof taking care of complexity mainly due to missions in unstructured, unknown and dynamic environments, lots of softwarecomponents from the drivers of each hardware to high level learning algorithms should be integrated along with a frameworkof software. So, many researchers have been very interested in software architectures as a key issue in designing robot systems, because it is more than a set of components like software library and it provides a powerful development environment in terms of abstraction and modularity