This paper reports the development and field testing of DVLNAV, an interactive program for precision three-dimensional navigation of underwater vehicles. The goal of this system is to provide vehicle position and velocity navigation data with both the precision and update rate necessary to enable closed-loop vehicle control. We report the results of preliminary field trials of DVLNAV with the J...

This paper reports the development of a new hydrodynamics test facility for UUV dynamics, navigation, and control research. Located at the Johns Hopkins University, the facility’s 174,000 liter water tank, navigation instrumentation, and testbed ROV provides the ability for development of advanced underwater vehicle systems. Experimental data demonstrating the performance of the facility’s sens...

The long term goals of the project are: (1) To establish systems and algorithms for controlled Lagrangian particle tracking that will be used to improve the accuracy of model based prediction of trajectories of controlled underwater vehicles subjected to ocean current. (2) To achieve a mission planning system for robotic underwater sensor networks that are able to perform automatic or semiautom...

In this paper, we consider the time minimal problem for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle. We investigate, on a simplified model, the existence of singular extremals and discuss their optimality status. Moreover, we prove that singular extremals corresponding to the angular acceleration are of order 2. We produce in this case a semicanonical form of our Hamiltonian system and we can conclude the...

In this paper, we propose a data-gathering scheme for hierarchical underwater sensor networks, where multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are deployed over large-scale coverage areas. The deployed AUVs constitute an intermittently connected multihop network through inter-AUV synchronization (in this paper, synchronization means an interconnection between nodes for communication) for f...

Marine Autonomous Vehicles, either Surface (ASV) or Underwater (AUV) are becoming the kingpin for ocean research and sea exploration. Long term and high persistence are highly desirable characteristics for adding to these autonomous platforms. The possibility of performing adequate tasks by using low cost underwater vehicles could multiply the number of agents in the area and therefore, providi...

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) are usually equipped with vision sensors. However, the underwater images captured by AUV often suffer from effects such as diffusion, scatter and caustics. So image enhancement methods are necessary to increase visual quality. A Median filter de-noising approach based on multi-wavelet transform was proposed to remove the impulse noise viewed as random noise ...

This paper presents recent work on the improvement of the robotics vision based control strategy for underwater pipeline tracking system. The study focuses on developing image processing algorithms and a fuzzy inference system for the analysis of the terrain. The main goal is to implement the supervisory fuzzy learning control technique to reduce the errors on navigation decision due to the pip...