A Convenint state machine formalism for high level control of autonomous underwater vehicles

Recent successes in Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) technology have generated demand for broader, more general use of these vehicles, along with demand for longer, me complicated missions.However,AUVs are becoming more complex, and hence more difficult to program, test and maintain. A discrete event system would provide conditional execution for mission mangement, failure setection, and resource allocation techniques. The goal of this thesis is to provide a convenient formalism for discrete event systems that reduces the apparent compl reduces the apparent complexity of the system while maintaining its robuust copabilities. The chosen formalism allows the convenient repesentation of hierarchies of concurrent hierarchical state machines. The formal semantics of the model are discussed, algorithms .As an example, a complete design of the navigator state machine is provided .