This paper surveys the developments of last 10 years in the area of vision based target tracking for autonomous vehicles navigation. First, the motivations and applications of using vision based target tracking for autonomous vehicles navigation are presented in the introduction section. It can be concluded that it is very necessary to develop robust visual target tracking based navigation algo...

Biomimetic Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (BAUVs) are Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) that employ similar propulsion and steering principles as real fish. While the real life applicability of these vehicles has yet to be fully investigated, laboratory investigations have demonstrated that at low speeds, the propulsive mechanism of these vehicles is more efficient when compared with propel...

Recently, data collection from seabed by means of underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSN) has attracted considerable attention. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are increasingly used as UWSNs in underwater missions. Events and environmental parameters in underwater regions have a stochastic nature. The target area must be covered by sensors to observe and report events. A ‘topology cont...

Marine Autonomous Vehicles, either Surface (ASV) or Underwater (AUV) are becoming the kingpin for ocean research and sea exploration. Long term and high persistence are highly desirable characteristics for adding to these autonomous platforms. The possibility of performing adequate tasks by using low cost underwater vehicles could multiply the number of agents in the area and therefore, providi...

The applications of underwater vehicles have shown a dramatic increase in recent years, such as, mines clearing operation, feature tracking, cable or pipeline tracking and deep ocean exploration. According to different applications, the mechanical and electrical configuration and shape of an underwater vehicle are different. For instance, manipulators are necessary when doing mines clearing ope...

This dissertation concerns the development of a feedback control framework for coordinating multiple, sensor-equipped, autonomous vehicles into mobile sensing arrays to perform adaptive sampling of observed fields. The use of feedback is central; it maintains the array, i.e. regulates formation position, orientation, and shape, and directs the array to perform its sampling mission in response t...

My work is included in the framework of the FeedNetBack project. The objective of the project isthe collaborative control of several autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV). The first step of thisfinal year project is the realization of an efficient Matlab/Simulink model of the submersible, basedon Ifremer (marine vehicle constructor) data. Thus, the aim is to control the vehicle b...

1.1 Trajectory planning This chapter is a contribution to the field of Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence can be defined as the study of methods by which a computer can simulate aspects of human intelligence (Moravec, 2003). Among many mental capabilities, a human being is able to find his own path in a given environment and to optimize it according to the situation requirements. ...