Once deployed in the real world, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are out of reach for human supervision yet need to take decisions to adapt to unstable and unpredictable environments. To facilitate research on self-adaptive AUVs, this paper presents SUAVE, an exemplar for two-layered system-level adaptation of AUVs, which clearly separates the application and self-adaptation concerns. The exemplar focuses on a mission for underwater pipeline inspection by a single AUV, implemented as a ROS 2-based system. This mission must be completed while simultaneously accounting for uncertainties such as thruster failures and unfavorable environmental conditions. The paper discusses how SUAVE can be used with different self-adaptation frameworks, illustrated by an experiment using the Metacontrol framework to compare AUV behavior with and without self-adaptation. The experiment shows that the use of Metacontrol to adapt the AUV during its mission improves its performance when measured by the overall time taken to complete the mission or the length of the inspected pipeline.

Nowadays smart applications appear in domains spanning from commodity household applications to advanced underwater robotics. These smart applications require adaptation to dynamic environments, changing requirements and internal system errors Metacontrol takes a systems of systems view on autonomous control systems and self-adaptation, by means of an additional layer of control that manipulates and combines the regular controllers. This paper develops a formal model of a Metacontrol architecture. We formalise this Metacontrol architecture in the context of an autonomous house heating application, enabling different controllers to be dynamically combined in order to meet user requirements to a better extent than the individual controllers in isolation. The formal model is developed in the Maude rewriting system, where we show results comparing different scenarios.