In this paper, an intelligent navigation system for an unmanned underwater vehicle powered by renewable energy and designed for shadow water inspection in missions of a long duration is proposed. The system is composed of an underwater vehicle, which tows a surface vehicle. The surface vehicle is a small boat with photovoltaic panels, a methanol fuel cell and comm...

This paper is devoted to the problem of control design of an underwater vehicle/manipulator (UVM) system composed of a free navigating platform equipped with a robot manipulator. This composite system is driven by actuators and sensors having substantially different bandwidth characteristics due to their nature. Such difference allows for a mathematical setup which can be naturally treated by s...

This paper proposes the result of hardware in the loop simulation (HILS) for performance evaluation about a small attitude heading reference system (AHRS) based micro electro mechanical system (MEMS) suitable for small unmanned underwater vehicle. Unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) have many applications in scientific, military, and commercial area due to its autonomy and the navigation system ...

In order to improve the trajectory tracking accuracy of an Underwater Vehicle Manipulator System (UVMS) under uncertain disturbance conditions ocean current, a Model-free Adaptive Control (MFAC) method was used. Combined with Radial Basis Function Neural Networks (RBFNN), RBFNN-MFAC is proposed performance controller. A hydrodynamic model UVMS defined in commercial software, Fluent, calculate h...

Abstract: To provide a conventional autonomous underwater vehicle with gliding capability, we assume a moving battery and a buoyancy bag installed in a torpedo shaped autonomous underwater vehicle. We develop a mathematical model for the underwater vehicle and derive a stable gliding condition for it. Then an LQR controller is designed to control the zigzag depth of the vehicle, where the deriv...

This thesis examines the design and implementation of a vision system for an autonomous underwater vehicle. The vision system consists of three cameras, two being a stereo pair, and the third being attached to a pan/tilt unit to allow it to track moving targets. The goals for the development of the vision system were to: • Design and build all of the hardware for the vision system. The main foc...

A semi-autonomous unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV), named VSOR, is being developed at the Laboratory of Sensors and Actuators at the University of Sao Paulo. The vehicle has been designed to provide inspection and intervention capabilities in specific missions in deep water oil fields. This work presents a methodology to identify the drag coefficients and virtual mass/inertia of an open-frame ...