This paper reports on the status and design of the operational remotely operated vehicle Victor 6000, rated for 6000 m depth and of the 3000 m depth autonomous underwater vehicle Asterxx operated by Ifremer the French Institute for Sea Exploitation. Victor 6000 is part of a global system built of subsystems, scientific modules, winch and cable, dead weight and umbilical, positioning subsystem u...

This paper address the kinematic variables control problem for the low-speed manoeuvring of a low cost and underactuated underwater vehicle. Control of underwater vehicles is not simple, mainly due to the non-linear and coupled character of system equations, the lack of a precise model of vehicle dynamics and parameters, as well as the appearance of internal and external perturbations. The prop...

We study stability of underwater vehicle dynamics for a six-degree-of-freedom vehicle modeled as a neutrally buoyant, submerged rigid body in an ideal fluid. We consider the case in which the center of gravity and the center of buoyancy of the vehicle are noncoincident such that gravity introduces an orientation-dependent moment. Noting that Kirchhoff’s equations of motion for a submerged rigid...

The paper addresses the problem of making a set of vehicles follow a a set of given spatial paths at required speeds, while ensuring that they reach and maintain a desired formation pattern. Problems of this kind arise in a number of practical applications involving ground and underwater robots. The paper summarizes and brings together in a unified framework previous results obtained by the aut...

We address the subject of formation control of underwater vehicles, using either inter-vehicle relative position measurements or range-only measurements. The work is motivated by the MORPH project, aiming to use formations of vehicles with complementary capabilities to map the underwater environment in challenging conditions. The main problem studied is that of driving a vehicle (follower) to a...

AUTONOMOUS TRACKING AND FOLLOWING OF SHARKS WITH AN AUTONOMOUS UNDERWATER VEHICLE