Recent successes in Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) technology have generated demand for broader, more general use of these vehicles, along with demand for longer, more complicated missions. However, AUVs are becoming more complex, and hence more difficult to program, test and maintain. A discrete event system would provide conditional execution for mission management, failure detection, and resource allocation techniques. The goal of this thesis is to provide a convenient formalism for discrete event systems that reduces the apparent complexity of the system while maintaining its robust capabilities. The chosen formalism allows the convenient representation of hierarchies of concurrent hierarchical state machines. The formal semantics of the model are discussed, along with complete data structures and algorithms. As an example, a complete design of the navigator state machine is provided.
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