Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have been established as a viable tool for Oceanographic Sciences. Being untethered and independent, AUVs fill the gap in Ocean Exploration left by the existing manned submersible and remotely operated vehicles (ROV) technology. AUVs are attractive as cheaper and efficient alternatives to the older technologies and are breaking new ground in many applicatio...

NATO’s present capability to deal with a terrorist threat to our ports is slow, dangerous, and inefficient. Ports are a challenging area within which to conduct MCM operations due to several factors: shipping movements, very shallow water, turbidity, confined space, mine burial due to muddy/silty conditions, and high clutter density. The shortfall in NATO’s ability to deal with this problem has...

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...

With 900 Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) required over the next decade (Newman et al., 2007) existing survey-style AUVs need improved utilization factors. Additional control devices to extend operational capability need consideration together with the interchange between AUV control approaches. This paper considers supplementary through-body tunnel thruster control during the transition f...

We describe a novel integration of Planning with Probabilistic State Estimation and Execution. The resulting system is a unified representational and computational framework based on declarative models and constraintbased temporal plans. The work is motivated by the need to explore the oceans more cost-effectively through the use of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV), requiring them to be goa...

About 70% of the surface of the Earth is covered by oceans, and the ocean space represents a vast chamber of natural resources. In order to explore and utilize these resources, humankind depends on developing and employing underwater vehicles, not least unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). Today, UUVs encompass remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The fir...

utonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) share common A control problems with other air, land, and water unmanned vehicles. In addition to requiring high-dimensional and computationally intensive sensory data for real-time mission execution, power and communication limitations in an underwater environment make it more difficult to develop a control architecture for an AUV. In this article, the four...