Underwater vehicles are expected as the attractive tools for the operation in the extreme environment such as the deep ocean survey. In order to realize the useful and practical robots, which can work in the ocean, underwater vehicles should take their action by judging the changing condition from their own sensors and actuators, and are desirable to make their behavior with limited efforts of ...

This paper presents a stable schooling scheme for multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) where the number of independent actuators for each vehicle are less than the degrees of freedom (DOF). In most of the formation schemes presented so far, the multiple dynamic agents usually have been modeled as particle systems whose motions can be expressed as simple double-integrator. Therefore, t...

Underwater vehicles that are equipped with an on-board camera can utilize the captured frames to perceive the 3D structure of the ocean floor and thus perform safe underwater self-navigation. The focal length, frame rate and exposure time, which determine the frame capturing process, in association with the speed of the vehicle determine the capabilities of the vision-based navigation system. I...

A nonlinear vision based tracking system is developed to provide estimates of the position and velocity of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) relative to an Autonomous Surface Craft (ASC). Nonlinear estimator design builds on the theory of linear parametrically varying (LPV) systems. The theoretical framework adopted provides a powerful tool for estimator regional stability and performance ...

A novel algorithm for the detection of underwater man-made objects in forwardlooking sonar imagery is proposed. The algorithm takes advantage of the integral-image representation to quickly compute features, and progressively reduces the computational load by working on smaller portions of the image along the detection process phases. By adhering to the proposed scheme, real-time detection on s...

Among the underwater robotic systems that are currently available, remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are the most commonly used underwater robotic systems. A ROV is an underwater vehicle that is controlled from a mother-ship by human operators. Sometimes a ROV is equipped with one or more robotic manipulators to perform underwater tasks. These robotic manipulators are also controlled by human o...

Among the underwater robotic systems that are currently available, remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are the most commonly used underwater robotic systems. A ROV is an underwater vehicle that is controlled from a mother-ship by human operators. Sometimes a ROV is equipped with one or more robotic manipulators to perform underwater tasks. These robotic manipulators are also controlled by human o...

This work presents in detail the fuzzy control design for yaw and velocity control of an autonomous underwater vehicle. This control has been developed from the mathematical description of the hydrodynamic model of the vehicle, which is studied and discussed from different situations of forward velocity. The model is linearized and several linear controllers are designed for actuation at certai...

We are developing a visually-guided autonomous underwater vehicle. We have implemented a computed torque controller, using Euler parameters, for position and velocity control. This formulation eliminates singularity in the model and controller and offers some degrees of coupling between vehicle degrees of freedom. A calibrated thruster model which computes thrust output from measured voltage an...

This paper introduces an autonomous towed vehicle which has various navigation modes; towed mode, autonomous mode and kite mode, to stand against fast and changeable sea currents. The property assures safe and reliable observation works irrespective of a current speed. Such vehicle must be useful for port area application since in a port area sea currents are so fast and complex. The different ...