# Proposal of an Automated Mission Manager for Cooperative Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
## 7 Conclusions and Future Works  
In this paper we have identified that typical mission manager architectures for cooperative underwater robotic operations do not follow any decentralized control pattern for self-adaptive systems that enables a distributed adaptation to react to exogenous and unforeseen situations. We have also identified that these architectures typically focus on just one type of vehicle, providing a tightly coupled integration that prevents the use of legacy vehicles with reduced capabilities. Finally, we have also identified that for underwater operations the common transfer method of the mission plan to the vehicles is by preloading the plan, preventing possible updates of it during the mission. As a response, we have introduced the MTRR, a mission manager integrated in the SWARMs middleware architecture that provides capabilities for managing cooperative AUV missions at the mission level. Compared with typical mission managers, the novelty of the MTRR is that it is a mission manager part of a decentralized control pattern for self-adaptive systems, using a virtualization of the mission planning capabilities of the vehicles, and implementing an online dispatching method for the mission plan instead of the conventional preloading of the full mission. Indeed, the MTRR is part of a decentralized hierarchical control pattern where it enables management at the global mission level, while the AUVs retain the management at the vehicle level. It also uses a basic new virtualization approach to abstract the mission management from the planning capabilities of the AUVs, enabling the possibility of using legacy systems without onboard planners. Finally, it uses a novel online mission plan dispatch mechanism that enables the possibility of updating a vehicle plan from the mission level. The MTRR was implemented using Java as an integrated component of the SWARMs middleware. Validation and performance tests for the MTRR were successfully carried out during the SWARMs final demonstration in Trondheim. In the tests, the MTRR dispatched the tasks from the mission plan to the assigned AUVs using their internal virtual representation. Both the dispatching of the tasks and the reception and processing of the reports from the AUVs were performed successfully. The tests also provided us with some values of interest. In summary, we found a strong correlation between the length of the mission plan and the time required for the start mission activity (\(\rho_{s}=0.79,\;n=45,\;p<0.001\)). We also have found that access to the repositories is a possible bottleneck. In particular, when processing the environmental reports sent by the AUVs, the storage of the same state vector in the relational database took only an average of 18.50% of the time required for storing it in the semantic repository. In future works we intend to explore a more detailed use of the decentralized hierarchical control pattern and extend the use of the virtualization of autonomous vehicles. Specifically, as the proposed mission manager is easily decoupled from the application domain, we are currently working on its improvement and integration in the AFarCloud project for its use with autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles for precision agriculture. In addition, due to the results obtained in the validation, we also intend to explore how to reduce the impact of the access to the repositories, handled from the point of view of the mission manager. Conceptualization, N.L.M. ; methodology, N.L.M. ; software, N.L.M. and J.R.-M.; validation, N.L.M., J.R.-M. and Z.Z. ; formal analysis, N.L.M. ; investigation, N.L.M. and J.R.-M.; resources, N.L.M. and Z.Z. ; data curation, N.L.M. ; writing--original draft preparation, N.L.M. and J.R.-M.; writing--review and editing, N.L.M., J.R.-M. and Z.Z. ; visualization, N.L.M. ; supervision, J.-F.M.-O. ; project administration, J.-F.M.-O. ; funding acquisition, J.-F.M.-O. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.