Modular Hardware Architecture for the Development of Underwater Vehicles Based on Systems Engineering

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for this very interesting paper on the important topic of using systems engineering approaches in underwater robotics development.

I have only a few comments.

Lines 28 - 58:

This paragraph is very repetitive and hard to read. I recommend restructuring and rephrasing this part.

Line 148:

A reference [?] is missing here.

Line 349:

I guess this should be 4.1.4.

Sections 5 & 6:

These sections are somewhat brief. It would help very much to elaborate here. Especially, the paragraph on figure 8 requires more information on the experiments in order to be of use.

Author Response

Please find the response in the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Modular hardware architecture for the development of underwater vehicles based on systems engineering
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The abstract is well defined.

Some recent studies on development of hardware in loop and software in loop systems on marine robots need to be mentioned 
as well to give a complete list of applications to the reader for situational awareness:

> Peeters, Gerben, et al. "Decoupled Hydrodynamic Models and Their Outdoor Identification for an Unmanned Inland Cargo Vessel with Embedded Fully Rotatable Thrusters."
 Journal of Marine Science and Engineering 8.11 (2020): 889.

> Bae, Jun Han, et al. "Development of an unmanned surface vehicle for remote sediment sampling with a van veen grab sampler." OCEANS 2019 MTS/IEEE SEATTLE. IEEE, 2019.

> Luo, Shaocheng, et al. "Image Processing and Model-Based Spill Coverage Path Planning for Unmanned Surface Vehicles." OCEANS 2019 MTS/IEEE SEATTLE. IEEE, 2019.

The use of the Vee Model is quite novel for architecture development for marine robots

In terms of typographical errors, many references are not cross-referenced and missing in the manuscript (missing places have ?; check you .cls file)
e.g. Tool commonly associated with a QFD, known as the House of Quality (HoQ), provides a reference for this.

Figure 4 is excellent. 

In terms of benchmarking the proposed architecture, the approach is missing against existing architecture. Provide input.

How is liquid and sediment sampling application expedited with current ROV? provide some data there.

Author Response

Please find the response in the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf