Abstract:
In the past Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) have been used to perform different tasks such as mapping the ocean floor and on-site exploration. Current research reveals even more applications for UUVs in many different areas in-cluding the military, scientific research, commercial uses, and even certain aspects of law enforcement. Unless missions for these applications can be written using a high-level pro-gramming language, many of these missions will be error prone and difficult to maintain, especially if missions are cre-ated for a group of cooperating UUVs to achieve a common goal. If the group contains UUVs that have different capabili-ties all together, writing and maintaining multiple missions for this heterogeneous group will be even more difficult. The goal in this paper is to propose methods that utilize an exist-ing high-level Mission Programming Language (MPL) as a framework to allow a user to create a set of parallel sub-missions for a group of UUVs from a user specified mission. We discuss various methods of generating automatically a set of parallel sub-missions from this user specified mission and provide some preliminary results from our simulations that implement the proposed methods.