Our immediate objectives are to develop a technique to measure vertical water velocity and the turbulent fluxes of heat and salt with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV), and to construct a vehicle to fully test and exploit the technique. This has been done in a limited way with our Autonomous Conductivity and Temperature Vehicle (ACTV). Morison and McPhee (1998) use the vertical motion of the...

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 phantoms 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 increme...

This paper reports the formulation and evaluation of a centralized extended Kalman filter designed for a novel navigation system for underwater vehicles. The navigation system employs Doppler sonar, depth sensors, synchronous clocks, and acoustic modems to achieve simultaneous acoustic communication and navigation. The use of a single moving reference beacon eliminates the requirement for the u...

Underwater navigation and localization using single range measurements presents low–cost alternative to well established underwater localization systems. In this paper, single range localization with respect to stationary and mobile beacon is presented. Also, observability properties of single range localization systems are given and vehicle trajectories which ensure observability are character...

Performing subsea intervention tasks is a challenge due to the complexities of the underwater domain. We propose to use a learning by demonstraition algorithm to intuitively teach an intervention autonomous underwater vehicle (IAUV) how to perform a given task. Taking as an input few operator demonstrations, the algorithm generalizes the task into a model and simultaneously controls the vehicle...

Development of a robust autonomous Underwater Robotic Vehicle (URV) is a key element to the exploitation of marine resources. An accurate dynamic model is important for both controller design and mission simulation, regardless of the control strategy employed. In this paper, a dynamic model for an underwater vehicle with an n-axis robot arm is developed based on Kane’s method. The technique pro...

Future Naval operations necessitate the incorporation of autonomous underwater vehicles into a collaborative network. In future complex missions, a forward look capability will also be required to map and avoid obstacles such as sunken ships and reefs. Following previous work on steering control, this work examines collision avoidance behaviors in bottom following using a hypothetical forward-l...

Coordinated fleet of Autonomous Underwater Gliders (AUGs) can provide significant benefit to a number of marine applications including ocean sampling, mapping, surveillance and communication. Traditional techniques for navigating underwater vehicles have been designed for single-vehicle operations and do not scale well to multi-vehicle operations and missions. In this paper a navigation system ...