Objectives  In order to guarantee the navigation safety of high speed Autonomous Underwater Vehicles(AUV), a new type of practical and reliable emergency system is developed.

  Methods  First, this paper introduces the composition of the emergency self-rescue system and analyses and designs the reliability of the system. Secondly, it mainly focuses on the emergency mechanism and strategies, which include the multi-channel data collection mechanism, active emergency switch mechanism and automatic fault priority setting mechanism, as well as the contents of the emergency action methods. Next, an expert emergency decision-making model is designed to output action decisions to handle the faults. Discrete steering rules are introduced to raise the AUV in emergency conditions. Finally, based on the VxWorks real-time operating system, the emergency system control software is coded and hardware in the loop simulation carried out.

  Results  The results show the feasibility of the emergency self-rescue mechanism and strategies.

  Conclusions  As such, the emergency system and mechanism introduced in this paper can make up for shortages in traditional emergency means, which has important reference value for the self-rescue methods of submarine-shaped AUVs.