Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) usually operate in ocean environments characterized by complex spatial variability which can jeopardize their missions. To avoid this, planning safety routes with minimum energy cost is of primary importance. This work revisits the benefits, in terms of travelling time, of path planning in marine environments showing spatial variability. By means of a path ...

This paper reports the initial results of an effort to develop simple and fast vision algorithms on compact and imoeddaDle hardware for the guidance and control of an autonomous underwater vehicle. The specific application involves tracking underwater cables and chains. Feature points are identified in the underwater video images using a technique which combines segmentation by gray level and r...

We report the results obtained during the verification of Autosub6000, an autonomous underwater vehicle used for deep oceanic exploration. Our starting point is the Simulink/Matlab engineering model of the submarine, which is discretised by a compiler into a representation suitable for model checking. We assess the ability of the vehicle to function under degraded conditions by injecting faults...

TRIDENT is a STREP project recently approved by the European Commission whose proposal was submitted to the ICT call 4 of the 7 th Framework Program. The project proposes a new methodology for multipurpose underwater intervention tasks. To that end, a cooperative team formed with an Autonomous Surface Craft and an Intervention Autonomous Underwater Vehicle will be used. The proposed methodology...

The moth-inspired plume-tracing strategies on a single REMUS underwater vehicle successfully tracked a Rhodamine dye plume over 100 m and declared its source location in near-shore ocean environments that are characterized by turbulence, tides, and waves. This paper expands moth-inspired plume tracing via a single vehicle to multiple vehicles. The new strategy includes a mechanism determining a...

When using underwater autonomous vehicles, it is important to localize them. Underwater localization is very approximate. As a result, instead of a single location x, we get a set X of possible locations of a vehicle. Based on this set of possible locations, we need to find the range of possible values of the corresponding objective function f(x). For missions on the ocean floor, it is benefici...

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...

We present Dolphin, an extensible programming language for autonomous vehicle networks. A Dolphin program expresses an orchestrated execution of tasks defined compositionally for multiple vehicles. Building upon the base case of elementary one-vehicle tasks, the built-in operators include support for composing tasks in several forms, for instance according to concurrent, sequential, or event-ba...

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 ...

The control design for unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) is challenging due to the uncertainties in the complex dynamic modeling of the vehicle as well as its unstructured operational environment. To cope with these difficulties, a practical robust control is therefore desirable. The paper deals with the application of coefficient diagram method (CDM) for a robust control design of an autonom...