We present a system for autonomous underwater navigation as implemented on a Nekton Ranger autonomous underwater vehicle, AUV. This is one of the rst implementations of a practical application for simultaneous localization and mapping on an AUV. Besides being an application of real-time SLAM, the implemtation demonstrates a novel data fusion solution where data from 7 sources are fused at di er...

Maneuverability describes a vehicle’s ability to change course or turn. Maneuverability of conventional underwater vehicles, such as torpedoes, can be determined by altering the position and length of control fins. To perform large-area surveying tasks, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) generally require different maneuverability characteristics in their vertical and horizontal planes of mo...

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...

This paper reports on an exact real-time solution for server-client cooperative localization over a faulty and extremely bandwidth-limited underwater communication channel. Our algorithm, termed the origin state method, enables a ‘server’ vehicle to aid the navigation of multiple ‘client’ vehicles via a novel representation of the server’s pose-graph that is robust to communication packet loss....

Underwater gliders are type of autonomous underwater vehicle that glide by controlling their buoyancy and attitude using internal actuators. By changing the vehicle’s buoyancy intermittently, vertical motion can be achieved. Characteristic of glider motions include upward and downward in a saw tooth pattern, turning and gliding in a vertical spiral motion glides without using thrusters or prope...

The objective of this paper is to present a downsized prototype of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) designed with the idea of dealing with cooperative tasks involving multiple agents. The entire system has been designed for marine and underwater environmental surveillance and protection. The agents provide an interesting point in the surveillance of shallow coastal waters and shallow wate...

A neural network based robust control system design for the yaw angle of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is presented in this paper. Two types of control structure were used to control prescribed trajectories of an AUV. The results of the simulation showed that the proposed neural network based robust control system has superior performance in adapting to large random disturbances such as w...

The extraction of reliable features is a key issue for autonomous underwater vehicle navigation. Imaging sonars can produce acoustic images of the surroundings of the vehicle. Despite of the noise, the phantom echoes and reflections, we believe that they are a good source for features since they can work in turbid water where other sensors like vision fail. Moreover, they can cover wide areas i...

Attitude control systems for autonomous underwater vehicles are often implemented with separate controllers for pitch motion in the vertical plane and yaw motion in the horizontal plane. We propose a novel time-varying model for a streamlined autonomous underwater vehicle that explicitly displays the coupling between yaw and pitch motion due to nonzero roll angle and/or roll rate. The model fac...

This paper describes a virtual collaborative world simulator, DVECS (Distributed Virtual Environment Collaborative Simulator), for underwater robots and its underwater vehicle, SAUVIM (Semi-Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for Intervention Missions). DVECS is used for testing unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) of both real and simulated worlds where interaction and cooperation of other real and s...