This paper describes the 2008 and 2009 Antarctic deployments of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ENDURANCE autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The goal of this project was to conduct three autonomous tasks beneath the ice cap 4 m thick of West Lake Bonney: first, to measure the three-dimensional (3D) water chemistry of the lake at prespecified coordinates; second, to map the u...

Research on the autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) has been gaining more interest in the recent past. AUVs have been envisioned as a cost effective and safe solution for various underwater missions including but are not limited to underwater scientific test-bed, deep oceanic surveillance, environmental monitoring and underwater structures inspection. The control for such autonomous vehicles,...

The paper describes the design, implementation, and testing at sea of the vehicle and mission control systems of Sirene, an autonomous underwater shuttle for the automatic deployment of benthic stations down to depths of 4000 meters.

At the Australian National University we are developing an autonomous underwater vehicle for exploration and inspection. Our aim is to develop on-board intelligent control. We intend that the vehicle will learn to control its thrusters in response to command and sensor inputs. Algorithms based on reinforcement learning with continuous state and actions are being developed for this purpose.