CONTROLS
Flight Dynamics and Attitude Control
The current approach to stabilizing the Stingrays flight is the notion of Successive Loop Closure (SLC). Essentially this boils down to decoupling your dynamics in subsystems at different rates. On the Stingray for example, the same thrusters that control depth also control roll. It is simple enough to imagine circumstances where the desired commands for depth control might conflict with those for roll correction. By correcting roll at a much higher frequency than depth, the dynamics of the two controllers do not fight each other. This same technique is also used to decouple yaw and surge.
Navigation
The navigation system dictates to the vehicle where to move by updating the desired heading, depth, and orientation. If the task planner is currently performing a vision based task, it will instruct the vision computer of the current task. The vision computer then uses the appropriate image processing techniques on the video streams and relays back the image coordinates of interest. This provides the navigation with new directions. The same holds true when performing non vision tasks, except that the coordinates of interest may be derived acoustically or however the planner dictates.