Intelligent control of autonomous underwater vehicles: the Orca project

Establishing a useful presence in the ocean is becoming increasingly important to science, industry, and the military, yet the undersea environment is hostile to human presence. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) offer a solution. Before widespread use of AUVs is practical, however, mechanisms for intelligent control must be developed. In this paper, we report on the Orca project, which has the aim of creating a robust, intelligent, mission-level controller for long-range ocean science AUVs. Orca is now being built and tested in simulation; in the future, it will undergo in-water tests aboard the Marine Systems Engineering Laboratory's EAVE-III vehicles. In this paper, we discuss the motivation behind the project, the Orca program, and our current status and future work.