The operation of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) within underwater sensor network fields provides an opportunity to reuse the network infrastructure for long baseline localisation of the AUV. Computationally efficient localisation can be accomplished using off-the-shelf hardware that is comparatively inexpensive and which could already be deployed in the environment for monitoring purpose...

This project will address the problem of creating mosaic maps of the seafloor using remotely-operated vehicles (ROV) or autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) operated by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). The author believes that a number of shortcomings of the current system could be improved upon through the use of SIFT for image registration. Time permitting, the author wou...

This paper presents a stable schooling scheme for multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) where the number of independent actuators for each vehicle are less than the degrees of freedom (DOF). In most of the formation schemes presented so far, the multiple dynamic agents usually have been modeled as particle systems whose motions can be expressed as simple double-integrator. Therefore, t...

We present a design of a leaderless formation controller for networked vehicle systems, which uses concepts from sliding mode control and dynamic extension. A single gain varies the importance of the relative and absolute position terms, allowing for tight or loose formations. This approach is proven mesh stable. Applications include formation flying of Unmanned Air Vehicles as well as possible...

Maneuverability describes a vehicle’s ability to change course or turn. Maneuverability of conventional underwater vehicles, such as torpedoes, can be determined by altering the position and length of control fins. To perform large-area surveying tasks, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) generally require different maneuverability characteristics in their vertical and horizontal planes of mo...

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are increasingly used, both in military and civilian applications. These vehicles are limited mainly by the intelligence we give them and the life of their batteries. Research is active to extend vehicle autonomy in both aspects. Our intent is to give the vehicle the ability to adapt its behavior under different mission scenarios (emergency maneuvers versus...

Purpose – The main purpose of this paper is to investigate two key elements of localization and mapping of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), i.e. to overview various sensors and algorithms used for underwater localization and mapping, and to make suggestions for future research. Design/methodology/approach – The authors first review various sensors and algorithms used for AUVs in the terms o...

This paper presents two acoustic-based techniques to solve the localization problem for an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). After a brief description of the Bayesian filtering framework, the paper analyses two of the most common underwater scenarios. Each scenario corresponds to one of the two localization techniques. The scenarios are as follows: map-based localization, when the environmen...