Distributed processing tools for autonomous underwater vehicles

This thesis discusses the design and implementation of a generic distributed toolkit that facilitates the development of distributed software for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). This toolkit makes the details of interprocess communication transparent to the programmers involved in the AUV software development. The toolkit provides efficient direct communication between processes and does not impose any constraints on the architecture of the distributed software.; Conventional techniques for monitoring/debugging of sequential programs are not applicable for distributed processes. This is because the correctness of a real-time distributed program is determined not only by its "logical" correctness but also its "timing" correctness. Monitoring mainly comprises of observation of the system during its operation. Debugging is mostly a graphical "post-mortem" analyses of the dumps generated by the distributed program. This thesis also presents the design of a window based generic graphical monitoring/debugging tool. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...