SUAVE: An Exemplar for Self-Adaptive Underwater Vehicles

Once deployed in the real world, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are out of reach for human supervision yet need to take decisions to adapt to unstable and unpredictable environments. To facilitate research on self-adaptive AUVs, this paper presents SUAVE, an exemplar for two-layered system-level adaptation of AUVs, which clearly separates the application and self-adaptation concerns. The exemplar focuses on a mission for underwater pipeline inspection by a single AUV, implemented as a ROS 2-based system. This mission must be completed while simultaneously accounting for uncertainties such as thruster failures and unfavorable environmental conditions. The paper discusses how SUAVE can be used with different self-adaptation frameworks, illustrated by an experiment using the Metacontrol framework to compare AUV behavior with and without self-adaptation. The experiment shows that the use of Metacontrol to adapt the AUV during its mission improves its performance when measured by the overall time taken to complete the mission or the length of the inspected pipeline.