Recognizing the potential of autonomous underwater vehicles for scientific and military applications, in 1997 MIT and the NATO Undersea Research Centre initiated a Joint Research Project (GOATS), for the development of environmentally adaptive robotic technology applicable to mine counter measures (MCM) and rapid environmental assessment (REA) in coastal environments. The August 2001 GOATS Conf...

Positively buoyant autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) operate at survey speeds with a pitch angle that is maintained through application of the control surfaces, sufficient to generate hydrodynamic forces to counteract the excess buoyancy. To facilitate lower forward speeds and the ability to hover requires some additional method of control. This paper reviews possible options and then indic...

In this paper, we propose a novel distributed localization scheme LDB, a 3D localization scheme with directional beacons for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UWA-SNs). LDB localizes sensor nodes using an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) as a mobile beacon sender. Mounted with a directional transceiver which creates conical shaped directional acoustic beam, the AUV patrols over the 3D dep...

The range of an AUV is dictated by its finite energy source and minimising the energy consumption is required to maximise its endurance. One option to extend the endurance is by obtaining the optimum hydrodynamic hull shape with balancing the trade-off between computational cost and fluid dynamic fidelity. An AUV hull form has been optimised to obtain low resistance hull. Hydrodynamic optimisat...

In project Small Team of Autonomous Robotic Fish (STARFISH), we are building a team of lowcost Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), each with different capabilities and being able to accomplish a particular mission collectively by sharing information. A team of AUVs has distinct advantages over a single complex AUV in terms of fault tolerance, redundancy, simultaneous multipoint spatial sampl...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to identify the remodeling parameters cardiomyocyte (CM) damage or death, hypertrophy, and fibrosis that may be linked to outcomes in patients with advanced heart failure (HF) in an effort to understand the pathogenic mechanisms of HF that may support newer therapeutic modalities. BACKGROUND There are controversial results on the influence of fibrosis, CM ...

The aim of the Smart and Networking Underwater Robots in Cooperation Meshes (SWARMs) project is to make autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), remote operated vehicles (ROVs) and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) more accessible and useful. To achieve cooperation and communication between different AUVs, these must be able to exchange messages, so an efficient and reliable communication network ...

Despite their strong dependence on the pelagic environment, seabirds and other top predators in polar marine ecosystems are generally studied during their reproductive phases in terrestrial environments. As a result, a significant portion of their life history is understudied which in turn has led to limited understanding. Recent advances in autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) technologies have...

AUVs increasingly are being used to collect data in the benthic environment. Many of these data collection tasks require that the AUV is able to follow the terrain at standoff distances on the order of meters (e.g. benthic imaging). However, terrain following with an AUV is a challenging problem when the terrain is rough, and the task becomes even more difficult when using motion-constrained ve...

This paper presents a vision-based docking algorithm for an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The algorithm allows the AUV to egress through a melthole in the frozen surface of a lake after the AUV’s dead-reckoning system brings the vehicle in the vicinity of the melthole. A blinking light source is used to guide the robot towards the melthole and through it. A light detection and tracking a...