Missions preparation and design of new algorithms for Charlie and Taipan within Thetis, a HIL simulator

The purpose of this paper is to present why and how the new simulator, called Thetis, can be used to test and validate new coordinated command algorithms. We focus on examples involving the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Taipan 2 developed at LIRMM-CNRS (France) and the Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) Charlie developed at ISSIA-CNR (Italy). Thetis is a new real-time multi-vehicles simulator for heterogeneous vehicles. It allows Hardware In The Loop (HIL) simulations including the use of virtual sensors providing a representation of a virtual world, including the support of communication devices. After a short state-of-the-art study, we introduce the main mechanisms of our simulator and we present the specificities of our tool compared to the other existing solutions. Finally we show a set of typical missions involving Taipan 2 and Charlie, focusing on the ability of our tool to validate ongoing propositions concerning otilla strategy. © 2009 IFAC.