A fuzzy logic based general purpose modular control architecture is presented for underwater vehicle autonomous navigation, control and collision avoidance. Three levels of fuzzy controllers comprising the sensor fusion module, the collision avoidance module and the motion control module are derived and implemented. No assumption is made on the specific underwater vehicle type, on the amount of...

The Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Laboratory (AUV Lab) at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is currently building and testing a new, general purpose and inexpensive 6000 meter capable Hovering Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (HAUV), the ‘ODYSSEY IV class’. The vehicle is intended for rapid deployments, potentially with minimal navigation, thus supporting episodic dives for explorato...

Currently a platform to investigate the underwater environment is required. In this paper, we propose an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) with an accurate positioning system. The positioning system is developed to be accurate enough to utilize the superior navigation ability of our AUV feature. The navigation ability is acquired by the variable vector propeller mechanism. The accurate positi...

The paper addresses the problem of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) modeling and parameter estimation as a means to predict the expected dynamic performance of underwater vehicles and thus provide solid guidelines during the design phase. The use of analytical and semi-empirical (ASE) methods to predict the hydrodynamic derivatives of the most popular class of AUVs is discussed. An applicati...

This paper reports the development of a new remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) designed to serve as a platform for rapid development and deployment of novel underwater vehicle systems. The goal is to enhance our ability develop new underwater vehicle subsystems in the laboratory, and rapidly field-test these new systems. Although a significant fraction of ONR and NSF sponsored underwate...

We present an application of HUGIN to solve problems related to diagnosis and control of autonomous vehicles. The application is based on a distributed architecture supporting diagnosis and control of autonomous units. The purpose of the architecture is to assist the operator or piloting system in managing fault detection, risk assessment, and recovery plans under uncertainty. To handle uncerta...

The research of Underwater Acoustic Networks (UANs) is attracting attention due to their important underwater applications for military and commercial purposes. Underwater wireless communication networks (UWCNs) consist of sensors and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that interact, coordinate and share information with each other to carry out sensing and monitoring functions. In last sever...