Abstract
Major challenges are presented when managing a large number of heterogeneous vehicles that have to communicate underwater in order to complete a global mission in a cooperative manner. In this kind of application domain, sending data through the environment presents issues that surpass the ones found in other overwater, distributed, cyber-physical systems (i.e., low bandwidth, unreliable transport medium, data representation and hardware high heterogeneity). This manuscript presents a Publish/Subscribe-based semantic middleware solution for unreliable scenarios and vehicle interoperability across cooperative and heterogeneous autonomous vehicles. The middleware relies on different iterations of the Data Distribution Service (DDS) software standard and their combined work between autonomous maritime vehicles and a control entity. It also uses several components with different functionalities deemed as mandatory for a semantic middleware architecture oriented to maritime operations (device and service registration, context awareness, access to the application layer) where other technologies are also interweaved with middleware (wireless communications, acoustic networks). Implementation details and test results, both in a laboratory and a deployment scenario, have been provided as a way to assess the quality of the system and its satisfactory performance
Original language | English |
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Article number | 1802 |
Pages (from-to) | 1802 |
Number of pages | 1 |
Journal | Sensors |
Volume | 17 |
Issue number | 8 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 5 Aug 2017 |
Keywords
- Autonomous underwater vehicles
- Cyber-physical systems
- Middleware
Project and Funding Information
- Project ID
- info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/662107/EU/Smart and Networking UnderWAter Robots in Cooperation Meshes/SWARMS
- Funding Info
- European Commission H2020. SWARMs_x000D_ European project (Smart and Networking Underwater Robots in Cooperation Meshes), under Grant Agreement_x000D_ No. 662107-SWARMs-ECSEL-2014-1, partially supported by the ECSEL JU, the Spanish Ministry of Economy_x000D_ and Competitiveness (Ref: PCIN-2014-022-C02-02).