| Abstract | Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) are rapidly emerging as an important tool in ocean exploration and maritime defence systems. Reliability is one of the key issues in making these vehicles viable for scientific, commercial and military applications. The vehicles must be able to accomplish the mission, or some subset of the mission objectives. The research herein is concerned with defining vehicle behaviours in the light of design choices that will result in improved vehicle performance under nominal (fault-free) operating conditions and with guarantees of acceptable vehicle behaviour even with control plane faults. Numerical studies were performed using a computer model of the AUV C-SCOUT. Because it is typical of many vehicles active in the world today, the results are qualitatively valid for a large number of vehicles. Quantifying the behaviours provides a foundation for further analysis of behaviours in various planned and unplanned conditions the vehicle will experience over the course of its active lifetime. |
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