Recent trends in control architectures for autonomous underwater vehicles

This article describes the recent trends in control architectures for auton omous vehicles. The study has been carried out on 22 architectures, most of which relate to the field of underwater robotics. The main aim of this art icle is to show the relationships between these various architectures and t o show how developments in architectures for autonomous land vehicles have been extended for use in autonomous underwater vehicles. A summary of impor tant features of the 22 architectures is presented and a new hybrid archite cture is proposed for the underwater vehicle GARBI.