This paper describes Jal, the new AUV designed by the student team of IURS for the purpose of shallow water survey, analysis and pipeline repair and monitoring operations. Propelled by two lateral and vertical propulsion thrusters, Jal weighs only about 7 Kg and measures close to 0.45 m in length and 0.36 m in width & height. Onboard sensor systems, custom passive sonar, real-time computer visi...

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...

The interest in deployment of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), such as AUV swarms, has been increasing. AUV swarms can reduce mission completion times and increase the system reliability. One of the basic constraints of these multiple vehicle systems is the limited communication between AUVs through the very challenging underwater acoustic channel. Even though reliable point-to-p...

The long-term goal of this program is to investigate those technologies that will enable the use of solar energy to power Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). The program is focused on investigation of our ability to extract sufficient energy from the sun's radiation to power an AUV and our ability to efficiently manage the collection, storage, and utilization of that energy such that an AUV ...

Simultaneous navigation and mapping (SLAM) of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) based on side-scan sonar data has significant peculiarities that make standard SLAM techniques inapplicable. In particular, recognition of already visited places (loop closure) which is an important tool improving the navigation accuracy cannot be done with the raw sonar data. This and other navigation tasks ca...

A bio-inspired neurodynamics based path-following controller of underactuated autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) in the presence of ocean current is proposed. A kind of bio-inspired neurodynamics model and the backstepping path-following controller are combined in this paper. The bio-inspired neurodynamics model is applied to generate smooth forward and angular velocities, so that the sharp sp...

In order to improve the persistent operation capacity of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), recovery system draws more and attention in recent years. A hybrid scheme combined with navigation, guidance control is proposed complete function recov-ery AUV paper. Based on scheme, firstly transformed into trajectory tracking problem, Dubins path planning method adopted build three-dimensional(3D) ...

The paper describes the design and testing of the depth and heading autopilots for a small Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) named Maya. Control system design is done using the LQ (Linear-Quadratic) optimization technique based on a mathematical model of the AUV obtained by resorting to analytical and semi-empirical methods. Details of system implementation are given and the results of tests ...

Exploration for robotic mapping is typically handled using greedy entropy reduction. Here we show how to apply information lookahead planning to a challenging instance of this problem in which an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) maps hydrothermal vents. Given a simulation of vent behaviour we derive an observation function to turn the planning for mapping problem into a POMDP. We test a vari...

This proposal describes a program of work designed to contribute to the Navy's capabilities in mastering the mine warfare problem by providing AUV hovering, rendezvous, and docking capability in modular reconfigurable AUVs. These enhanced maneuvering capabilities will extending mission durations, enable stormy weather operations, and provide station keeping abilities for imaging and interventio...