This paper describes a new experimental vehicle named V.O.R.T.E.X (Versatile and Open subsea Robot for Technical Experiment) built by the Subsea Robotics Laboratory at the French Institute for Sea Exploitation (lfremer). The aim of this project is to work out the metamophosis of a classical ROV architecture into an AUV architecture in particular for the control and programming architecture design. This vehicle is also designed to emulate the new IFREMER ROV6000 and the future Abyssal Survey Vehicle AUV, from a functional point of view.
Number of technological key points, including energy sources, materials, optimal navigation, low consumption hardware, intelligent control and programming tools are to be solved m order to increase autonomy in subsea systems. These Points are critical for AUV's mission and in particular for under ice mission in fully autonomous way or in teleprogramming way. This paper highly focuses on a complete high level control architecture With real time mission/task/sensor-based algorithms useful to prepare the next generation of AUV and ROV. A bottom-up approach from hardware, to servo control software and all the way up mission programming has been conduct between IFREMER and INRIA (French institute for computer sciences and Automation). In this framework we are strongly concerned with the object-oriented approach used for the vehicle software as well as the human-machine interface problem. Another objective concerns the hardware conception where the key idea consists in distributing the intelligences all over the different vehicle subsystems. At the task level, a high level software using the synchronous Esterel language has been built with INRIA. A second top-down approach conducted between IFREMER and the LIMI-UBO (University of Brest Fr) Lab focuses on the development of an interpreted language for mission supervisory management and specification. We will descanted the VORTEX high level control architecture using the top-down and the bottom-up approach, with the generic "SPIRAL" mission example.
