doi:10.3723/ut.33.247  Underwater Technology, Vol. 33, No 4, pp 247, 2016
org
Intelligent
Autonomy for
Unmanned
Marine Vehicles
By Carlos C Insaurralde
Published by Springer
International Publishing
Hardcover, 2015
ISBN: 978-3-319-18777-8
231 pages
This book provides a good, gen-
eralised background of intelli-
gent control architecture (ICA)
that quickly gives the reader an
appreciation of the wide range of
applications for this technology.
ICA allows one to design an
effective control strategy to form
a new kind of cooperation between
an autonomous surface craft
and an intervention autono-
mous underwater vehicle (AUV).
The autonomous characteristics
of ICA described in this book
will enable complex multi-vehicle
collaborative missions to be con-
ducted in a cost-effective way.
The results are based on FP7
funded TRIDENT project and
are quite convincing.
The book is well-written and
starts with simple architectures
before moving to more complex
ones, linking them up well. How-
ever, most of the flow diagrams
are difficult to read because of
the small font size used. This
makes it difficult to understand
some of the advanced concepts,
which would be the most useful
in designing missions. The author
could have provided some more
detailed explanations of the com-
plicated issues and more intelligi-
ble flow diagrams.
It is difficult to understand the
useful concepts without much
explanation. For example, page 41
is important for any system engi-
neers to decide the goals and sub-
goals of a mission, and it is divided
into many important tasks but not
explained well and the correspond-
ing figure is barely readable. Simi-
larly, fault-tolerant agent planning
in chapter 4 is really useful for any
autonomous system. It also pro-
vides guidance for designing and
redesigning any mission plan in
case of faults, as well as a way to
recover it in a cost-effective and
timely manner. However, the cat-
egorisation of the different fault
cases and failure conditions is dif-
ficult to follow and would be hard
to apply to the ICA and the author
could have explained the scenar-
ios in case of sensor’s failures.
The results are shown in simu-
lation for real scenarios for two
cases, seabed survey and target
selection, and the book provides
the required commands and
software coding, which are use-
ful. The sea trials for cooperative
www.sut.
Book Review
navigation in section 6.4 involv-
ing Delfim USV and Nessie
AUV validate the techniques
described in the book. It would
have been helpful if the author
could have demonstrated that
the results obtained using the
present method are consistent
with results obtained using a dif-
ferent technique. It would have
also been useful if the author
could have provided the list of
components used for real trials
in a table. In addition, no signifi-
cant limitations are discussed. It
would have been worthwhile to
mention the tradeoffs involved
in choosing the ICA as opposed
to a different method.
The conclusion reflects the
techniques used and explained in
the book illustrating clear advan-
tages to scientific, academic and
industrial sectors. It also addresses
future work and new research
directions. Overall this is a well-
written and well-presented vol-
ume. The book will greatly
benefit readers working in the
marine, military and defence
industries, as well as in the field of
marine biology, as it provides archi-
tectures for different scenarios that
enable planning and coordinating
activities in a synergetic manner to
reach cost-effective solutions for
their maritime missions.
(Reviewed by Dr Sanjay Sharma,
Associate Professor in Intelligent
Autonomous Control Systems,
Plymouth University)
247