Underwater navigation and localization using single range measurements presents low–cost alternative to well established underwater localization systems. In this paper, single range localization with respect to stationary and mobile beacon is presented. Also, observability properties of single range localization systems are given and vehicle trajectories which ensure observability are character...

Underwater vehicles that are equipped with an on-board camera can utilize the captured frames to perceive the 3D structure of the ocean floor and thus perform safe underwater self-navigation. The focal length, frame rate and exposure time, which determine the frame capturing process, in association with the speed of the vehicle determine the capabilities of the vision-based navigation system. I...

This article describes the design, modeling and identification of the main hydrodynamic parameters of an underwater glider vehicle is presented. The equations describing the dynamics of the vehicle is obtained from the Euler-Lagrange method. The main hydrodynamic parameters were obtained considering the geometry of the vehicle and its operating characteristics. Finally, simulation open loop sys...

High redundancy and strong uncertainty are two main characteristics for underwater robotic manipulators with unlimited workspace and mobility, but they also make the motion planning and control difficult and complex. In order to setup the groundwork for the research on control schemes, the mathematical representation is built by using the Denavit-Hartenberg (D-H) method [9]&[12]; in addition to...

This paper describes a concept for measuring the reproducible performance of mobile manipulators to be used for assembly or other similar tasks. An automatic guided vehicle with an onboard robot arm was programmed to repeatedly move to and stop at a novel, reconfigurable mobile manipulator artifact (RMMA), sense the RMMA, and detect targets on the RMMA. The manipulator moved a laser retroreflec...

This paper reports the development and preliminary experimental evaluation of a model-aided inertial navigation system (INS) for underwater vehicles. The implemented navigation system exploits accurate knowledge of the vehicle dynamics through an experimentally validated mathematical model, relating the water-relative velocity of the vehicle to the forces and moments acting upon it. Together wi...

Nowadays the size and dimension of mobile manipulators have been decreased for being usable in various regions. This leads several problems such as danger of instability. Therefore, many researches have been done to overcome the problem of overturning of a mobile manipulator. In this paper, an algorithm for increasing the stability of a mobile manipulator is presented based on the optimization ...

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...

In this paper we present a visual navigation system for retrieving untethered autonomous underwater vehicle (AW). The vision qstern guides the .4LV into a retriever which is a tethered underwater robot. The visual navigation modules include target searchin& line tracking, and positioning. The vision system is a dedicated parallel image processor composed of three T800 (Transputer). The processi...