Section: Application Domains

Underwater systems

Underwater systems, as presently used or intended by the offshore industry and marine research, are subject to severe technological constraints. In AUVs, the on-board power is limited and calls for both control and computing optimization. The links between the master and slave nodes use acoustic devices, which have a very low bandwidth and are subject to frequent transient loss, thus calling for sharing the decisional process among the nodes and for a robust implementation of the distributed control, taking into account the communication network features. These constraints together with the potential cost of failures make these systems good candidates for safe and flexible control, communication and computing co-design. The team already got a significant experience in this domain with a past collaboration with IFREMER and other EU projects. The projects CONNECT and FeedNetBack dealt with this type of problems (see 8.3.1.1 ).