Dependable service-oriented agents for maritime robotics

State-of-the-art technologies for ocean engineering are currently based on autonomous solutions to tackle more complex maritime missions by means of adaptation capabilities. This chapter presents how a Service-Oriented Agent Architecture (SOAA) for marine robots is endowed with resilient capabilities in order to build a robust (faulttolerant) vehicle control approach. The SOAA is based on two Information Technology (IT) paradigms for modern computing systems: service-oriented architecture and agent technology. The former mainly provides flexibility for dynamic reconfiguration. The latter particularly provides intelligent autonomy based on knowledge representation for situation awareness. This architectural approach moves away from fixed mission plans and very basic diagnostics schemes. It is able to handle unexpected faults at vehicle, sensor and sensor processing levels based on either hardware failure or environmental changes. This chapter provides a description of methods for on-board diagnosis and mitigation of faults. The operation context, and fault cases from different scenarios are presented. Remarking conclusions and future research work are also discussed.