Autonomous grasping of unknown objects by a robot is a highly challenging skill that is receiving increasing attention in the last years, and is still more challenging in underwater environments, with highly unstructured scenarios, limited availability of sensors and adverse conditions that affect the robot perception and control systems. This paper describes an approach for autonomous grasping...

The objective of this paper is to present a downsized prototype of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) designed with the idea of dealing with cooperative tasks involving multiple agents. The entire system has been designed for marine and underwater environmental surveillance and protection. The agents provide an interesting point in the surveillance of shallow coastal waters and shallow wate...

The use of omnidirectional cameras underwater is enabling many new and exciting applications in multiple fields. Among these, the creation of virtual tours from omnidirectional image surveys is expected to have a large impact in terms of science and conservation outreach. These surveys can be performed by Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) that can cover...

A neural network based robust control system design for the yaw angle of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is presented in this paper. Two types of control structure were used to control prescribed trajectories of an AUV. The results of the simulation showed that the proposed neural network based robust control system has superior performance in adapting to large random disturbances such as w...

Attitude control systems for autonomous underwater vehicles are often implemented with separate controllers for pitch motion in the vertical plane and yaw motion in the horizontal plane. We propose a novel time-varying model for a streamlined autonomous underwater vehicle that explicitly displays the coupling between yaw and pitch motion due to nonzero roll angle and/or roll rate. The model fac...

In the procedure of designing an underwater vehicle or robot, its maneuverability and controllability must be simulated and tested, before the product is finalized for manufacturing. Since the hydrodynamic forces and moments highly affect the dynamic and maneuverability of the system, they must be estimated with a reasonable accuracy. In this study, hydrodynamic coefficients of an autonomous un...

The successful ability to conduct underwater transportation using multiple autonomous vehicles (AUVs) is important for the commercial sector undertake precise installations on large modules, whilst military it has added advantage of improved secrecy clandestine operations. technical requirements are stability payload and internal collision avoidance while keeping track desired trajectory consid...

Gaussian processes are a powerful, non-parametric tool that can be be used in supervised learning, namely in regression but also in classification problems. The main advantages of this method are the ability of GPs to provide uncertainty estimates and to learn the noise and smoothness parameters from training data. The aim of this short tutorial is to provide the basic theoretical aspects of Ga...

With the developments in underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) technology, UWOC can be used conjunction with autonomous vehicles (AUVs) for high-speed data sharing among vehicle formation during exploration. A beam alignment problem arises due to transmission range, external disturbances and noise, uncertainties AUV dynamic model. In this article, we propose an acoustic navigation me...