Planning Inspection Tasks for AUVs

e are exploring the problem of autonomous inspection
and maintenance of a seabed facility, in the context of the
EU FP7 project, PANDORA. The autonomous inspection and
maintanence is to be carried out using AUVs over extended
horizons. To achieve this requires extensive operation without
human intervention, so it demands not only sophisticated
controllers to manage the necessary navigation and interaction
tasks, but also planning, to assemble the lower level tasks into
a coherent mission plan over a rolling horizon.
The project seeks to examine a range of issues in the
integration of planning and execution, including different aspects of the problems that arise because of the uncertainty in
the execution environment. However, we have, at this stage,
focussed on the problem of planning inspection missions
around seabed installations, managing the possibility that the
structure we are inspecting is different in some way from our
expectations, requiring closer inspection of particular parts or
of different parts to those originally planned.