This paper presents a six-degrees-of-freedom controller for autonomous underwater vehicles. The control algorithm is adaptive in the dynamic parameters that are poorly known and time-varying in the underwater environment. Moreover, the proposed control law adopts quaternions to represent attitude errors, and thus avoids representation singularities that occur when using instead Euler angles des...

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. This work presents a methodology to identify the drag coefficients and virtual mass/inertia of an open-frame ...

Design patterns represent a generalized approach to solving a related set of problems. Typically, a design pattern does not provide reusable code. Instead it provides a common vocabulary and a generalized approach in an application-independent manner. We have developed a design pattern for use in controlling autonomous vehicles. The control of individual components within an autonomous vehicle ...

This paper reports on an exact, real-time solution for server-client cooperative localization over a faulty and extremely bandwidth-limited underwater communication channel. Our algorithm, termed the origin state method, enables a ‘server’ vehicle to broadcast its navigation information to multiple ‘client’ vehicles over a bandwidthlimited and faulty communication channel. The server’s broadcas...

This paper represents research in progress in autonomous manipulation for underwater intervention missions within the context of the GRASPER project. This project focuses on developing manipulation skills for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). Current research in underwater robotics intends to increase autonomy for all kinds of robotic intervention operations that require physical interact...

This chapter reviews the concept of pose-graph simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for underwater navigation. We show that pose-graph SLAM is a generalized framework that can be applied to many diverse underwater navigation problems in marine robotics. We highlight three specific examples as applied in the areas of autonomous ship hull inspection and multi-vehicle cooperative navigation.

Underwater vehicles have been extensively applied to underwater intervention missions instead of human in recent years. As the crucial equipment of underwater vehicles, underwater manipulators typically play an important role in the underwater tasks. Generally, underwater manipulators are operated manually by human with remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). A KORDI ROV with a dual teleoperated man...

. Nowadays, the use of autonomous vehicles for ocean research has increased, since these vehicles have a better cost/performance ratio than crewed vessels or oceanographic ships. For example, autonomous surface vehicles can be used to localize underwater targets. This paper describes a mission to find a crawling robot Benthic Rover on the abyssal plain in the north eastern Pacific, using single...

This paper describes the basic control, navigation, and mapping methods and experiments a hovering autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) designed to explore flooded cenotes in Mexico as part of the DEPTHX project. We describe the low level control system of the vehicle, and present a dead reckoning navigation filter that compensates for frequent Doppler velocity log (DVL) dropouts. Sonar data col...