{ Diierent sensing techniques have been used for a long time in the development of remote operated vehicles (ROVs) and, in the recent years, autonomous underwater vehicles, (AUVs). Sonar has been the most popular choice in what concerns depth information or obstacle detection in most of the existing systems. Vision, however is a powerful sensing modality and could be used in many tasks where ac...

Underwater cameras are widely used to observe the sea floor. They are usually included in autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), and in situ ocean sensor networks. Despite being an important sensor for monitoring underwater scenes, there exist many issues with recent underwater camera sensors. Because of light’s transportation characteristics in water and th...

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,...

We are developing autonomous underwater vehicles for exploration and inspection tasks. Our objectives are to enable these submersible robots to autonomously search in regular patterns, follow along fixed natural and artificial features, and swim after dynamic targets. We have developed a method of visually-guiding autonomous land vehicles using correlationbased feature tracking to follow target...

Traditionally, deliberative reasoning methods based on a world model have been used to guide Autonomous Vehicles. Nevertheless, due to serious problems when dealing with complex and changing environments the alternative approach of reactive architectures appeared, directly coupling perception and action without any world representation. This paper describes the characteristics and variants of r...

The main problem in bringing autonomy to any vehicle lies in the design of a suitable guidance law. For a truly autonomous operation, the vehicle needs to have a reliable Navigation, Guidance and Control (NGC) system of which the guidance system is the key element, which generates suitable trajectories to be followed. In this survey paper, various guidance laws found in the literature and their...

. Nowadays, the use of autonomous vehicles for ocean research has increased, since these vehicles have a better cost/performance ratio than crewed vessels or oceanographic ships. For example, autonomous surface vehicles can be used to localize underwater targets. This paper describes a mission to find a crawling robot Benthic Rover on the abyssal plain in the north eastern Pacific, using single...