This paper presents an approach for estimating the relative location and orientation between two or more underwater vehicles operating in tight formation. One of the vehicles is equipped with a camera of wide field of view. The other vehicle(s) are equipped with active light markers to enable the use of computer vision for pose estimation. The pose estimation addresses two scenarios, which are ...

The use of commercially available autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) has increased during the last fifteen years. While they are mainly used for routine survey missions, there is a set of applications that nowadays can be only addressed by manned submersibles or work-class remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) equipped with teleoperated arms: the intervention applications. To allow these heavy v...

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...

DVECS (Distributed Virtual Environment Collaborative Simulator) is used for testing of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) where both real and simulated vehicles can interact and cooperate in a hybrid, synthetic, virtual environment. This virtual reality system can be used to determine: (1) the optimal performance and criteria for the cooperating vehicles and its relative application; (2) the d...

In the procedure of designing an underwater vehicle or robot, its maneuverability and controllability must be simulated and tested, before the product is finalized for manufacturing. Since the hydrodynamic forces and moments highly affect the dynamic and maneuverability of the system, they must be estimated with a reasonable accuracy. In this study, hydrodynamic coefficients of an autonomous un...

The paper addresses the general problem of estimating the position of an underwater target carrying an acoustic emitter by measuring the times of arrival (TOAs) of the acoustic signals at a set of surface buoys equipped with submerged hydrophones and GPS receivers. Examples of underwater targets of interest include AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles) and ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles) as w...

Many underwater monitoring tasks, such as submarine life studies and pipeline inspections, are usually performed manually. Automated underwater monitoring has the potential to increase safety, improve timeliness, and decrease costs. We propose a hybrid solution of stationary sensor buoys and swarms of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) and report on our current progress of its realization. Ou...

Hydrodynamic coefficients strongly affect the dynamic performance of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). A novel kind of underwater vehicle (Heavier-than-water AUV) with higher density than water is presented, which is different from conventional ones. RANS method and overlapping grids are used to simulate the flow field around the vehicle. Lifts, drags and moments of different attack and dr...