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...

A comparative study for the automatic control of an underwater vehicle has been conducted. The vessel had only three thrusters for the control of its position, something that made the problem very difficult. Furthermore the system is highly non-linear. A control system has been simulated for the regulation of the marine thrusters so that they stabilize the vehicle at a desired position, irrespe...

The Decavitator is a human-powered hydrofoil water vehicle designed for the fastest-possible speed over short distances. Since 1988, numerous versions of the underwater hydro-foil system, control and stability system, and pontoons were built and tested. In its present connguration, the vehicle consists of two kayak-type pontoons, with a central frame supporting the rider and the large air prope...

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,...

A semi-autonomous unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV), named VSOR, is being developed at the Laboratory of Sensors and Actuators at the University of Sao Paulo. The vehicle has been designed to provide inspection and intervention capabilities in specific missions in deep water oil fields. With the aim of identifying the hydrodynamic motion parameters, such as, drag coefficient and added mass iner...

This article discusses a control architecture for autonomous sailboat navigation and also presents a sailboat prototype built for experimental validation of the proposed architecture. The main goal is to allow long endurance autonomous missions, such as ocean monitoring. As the system propulsion relies on wind forces instead of motors, sailboat techniques are introduced and discussed, including...

Nowadays, the surveillance and inspection of underwater installations, such as power and telecommunication cables and pipelines, is carried out by trained operators who, from the surface, control a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) with cameras mounted over it. This is a tedious, time-consuming and expensive task, prone to errors mainly because of loss of attention or fatigue of the operator and ...

This paper describes the application of geometric bounding techniques to range-only navigation of an underwater vehicle. A geometric technique is defined to obtain a position fix of an underwater vehicle using a combination of dead-reckoning navigation and acoustic measurements of range between the underwater vehicle and a GPS equipped ship. An assessment is made of the accuracy to which naviga...