The 70 % of Earth's surface covered by oceans supports significant biological diversity and immense untapped potential for marine bioproducts. The recently completed international Census of Marine Life (2000-2010) invested heavily in evaluating the diversity, abundance, and distribution of life in the ocean but concluded that at least 50 % and potentially > 90 % of marine species remain undescr...

This paper presents experiments with a new algorithm for the unseady (tranient) thrust control bladed-propeller marine thrusters. Comparative experiments over a wide range of unsteady operating conditions with three different thrust control algorithms demonstrate the model-based control algorithm to offer transient thrust-control performance superior to that of its non-model-based counterpart. ...

An autonomous unmanned underwater vehicle is a type of marine self-propelled robot that executes some specific mission and returns to base on completion of the task. In order to successfully execute the requested operations, the vehicle must be guided by an effective navigation algorithm that enables it to avoid obstacles and follow the best path. Architectures and principles for intelligent dy...

The range of physiological adaptations possessed by marine animals allowing them to successfully operate in the marine environment is a plentiful source of inspiration for the designers of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles. This chapter compares the total energetic cost of straight line swimming for both marine animals and AUVs, using cost of transport (COT) as a comparative metric. COT is a norma...

The presented research concerns the control of unmanned vehicles. The results introduced in this dissertation provide a solid control framework for a wide class of nonlinear uncertain systems, with a special emphasis on issues related to implementation, such as control input amplitude and rate saturation, or partial state measurements availability. More specifically, an adaptive control framewo...

This paper tackles the combined problem of trajectory planning and tracking control of planar underactuated marine vehicles with different dynamic models. A reference feasible trajectory for the position and orientation is planned so as to be consistent with each of the three dynamic models. Using these reference values the dynamics of the vehicles is transformed to the error one. Partial state...