. Nowadays, the use of autonomous vehicles for ocean research has increased, since these vehicles have a better cost/performance ratio than crewed vessels or oceanographic ships. For example, autonomous surface vehicles can be used to localize underwater targets. This paper describes a mission to find a crawling robot Benthic Rover on the abyssal plain in the north eastern Pacific, using single...

This paper explores the intersection of two fields of research: autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), and archaeology in the deep sea. Archaeology in the deep sea poses a range of difficult, interesting problems for autonomous underwater vehicles. These include broad area sonar searches, target identification, and precision survey. Broad area sonar searches for archaeology have requirements si...

My long-term goal is to contribute, by means of an accurate hydrodynamics model, to efficient design, development and operation of autonomous underwater vehicles in energetic shallow waters. From a scientific viewpoint, the development of the AUV hydrodynamic model will contribute to a better understanding of wave-body-current interactions, nonlinear shallow-water waves, wave effects on stabili...

This paper reports the development of a new remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) designed to serve as a platform for rapid development and deployment of novel underwater vehicle systems. The goal is to enhance our ability develop new underwater vehicle subsystems in the laboratory, and rapidly field-test these new systems. Although a significant fraction of ONR and NSF sponsored underwate...

This paper discusses the requirements, design and operational aspects of the Unmanned Marine Vehicles (UMVs), namely the Romeo Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) and the Charlie Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), developed at CNR-ISSIA, Genova, Italy for robotics research and scientific applications, pointing out the synergies between the development of underwater and surface unmanned vehicles.

This paper reports the development and results of at-sea eld testing of a new control system for remotely operated underwater vehicles. The control system provides model-based closed loop trajectory tracking control in addition to conventional PID control, dynamic power management, and a high level of power control and monitoring. The control system is presently deployed on three operational US...

Hydrodynamic coefficients are the foundation of unmanned underwater vehicles modeling and controller design. In order to reduce identification complexity and acquire necessary hydrodynamic coefficients for controllers design, the motion of the unmanned underwater vehicle was separated into vertical motion and horizontal motion models. Hydrodynamic coefficients were regarded as mapping parameter...

Smaller autonomous underwater vehicles that use differential thrust for surge and yaw motion control has the advantage of low cost and, at the same time, increased ma­ neuverability in yaw direction. However, since such vehicles are underactuated vehicles, design of an autonomous control system that enables the vehicle to autonomously track a predefined trajectory is challenging. In this paper,...

Image processing has been one of hot issues for real world robot applications such as navigation and visual servoing. In case of underwater robot application, however, conventional optical camera-based images have many limitations for real application due to visibility in turbid water, image saturation under underwater light in the deep water, and short visible range in the water. Thus, most of...