Fault-Tolerant Architecture for AUVs

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) operate with limited external support and underwater missions usually have long or continuous duration, taking place in dynamic environments, which makes the creation of resilient, fault-tolerant AUVs a necessity. This paper briefly reviews some fault-tolerant techniques and presents the design of a fault-tolerant hardware architecture for AUVs and its application on a bench test prototype. The main fault tolerant techniques applied to the proposed architecture are hardware redundancy, which apply hybrid strategy, and software redundancy, which apply detection, contention, recovery and multiple version.