A behavior-based intelligent control architecture with application to coordination of multiple underwater vehicles

This paper presents a behavior-based intelligent control architecture for designing controllers which, based on their observation of sensor signals, compute the discrete control actions. These control actions then serve as the "set-points" for the lower level controllers. The behavior-based approach yields an intelligent controller which is a cascade of a perceptor and a response controller. The perceptor extracts the relevant symbolic information from the incoming continuous sensor signals, which enables the execution of one of the behaviors. The response controller is a discrete event system that computes the discrete control actions by executing one of the enabled behaviors. The behavioral approach additionally yields a hierarchical two layered response controller, which provides better complexity management. The inputs from the perceptor are used to first compute the higher level activities, called behaviors, and next to compute the corresponding lower level activities, called actions. This paper focuses on the discrete event subsystem, namely, the response controller. We illustrate the intelligent control architecture by discussing its application to the design of intelligent controllers for autonomous underwater vehicles used for ocean sampling missions. A complete set of discrete event models of the response controller of the underwater vehicles for the above application has been given, and their formal verification discussed.