Water covers nearly 70% of the Earth’s surface, and throughout history, oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, etc [...]

There is considerable worldwide interest in the use of groups of autonomous marine vehicles to carry our challenging mission scenarios, of which marine habitat mapping of complex, non-structured environments is a representative example. Relative positioning and formation control becomes mandatory in many of the missions envisioned, which require the concerted operation of multiple marine vehicl...

The micro-scale and meso-scale ocean dynamic processes which are nonlinear and have large variability, have a significant impact on the fisheries, natural resources, and marine climatology. A rapid, refined and sophisticated observation system is therefore needed in marine scientific research. The maneuverability and controllability of mobile sensor platforms make them a preferred choice to est...

The realization of cooperative Multiple Unmanned Marine Vehicles (MUMVs) is a real challenge, due to the conditions of the marine environment. In this paper we show the necessary steps of developments to enable already existing, single autonomous vehicles to participate in a team mission. We describe the design of the control software and put an emphasis on the task of Online Replanning of the ...

Worldwide, in the field of ocean exploration, there has been a surge of interest in the development of autonomous marine robotic vehicles equipped with advanced systems to steer them accurately and reliably in the harsh marine environment and allow them to collect data at the surface and underwater. Motivated by this fact, the first part of this dissertation proposes motion control algorithms (...

In this paper, we propose a nonlinear coordination control scheme for formation control of a group of underactuated marine vehicles with communication topology constraints. In particular, we propose decentralized control laws for coordinated path following of marine vehicles with sparse communication networks. The topology of the communication network is captured in the framework of graph theor...

Citation: Pittura L, Avio CG, Giuliani ME, d’Errico G, Keiter SH, Cormier B, Gorbi S and Regoli F (2018) Microplastics as Vehicles of Environmental PAHs to Marine Organisms: Combined Chemical and Physical Hazards to the Mediterranean Mussels, Mytilus galloprovincialis. Front. Mar. Sci. 5:103. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2018.00103 Microplastics as Vehicles of Environmental PAHs to Marine Organisms: Comb...

Developing a robust obstacle avoidance module is a foundamental step towards fully autonomous unmanned surface vehicles. Until now, most marine vehicles traverse following waypoints paths, usually GPS-based, totally unconcerned about possible collisions. In this paper, a combined system integrating autonomous flying and surface vehicles is suggested as solution to the path planning problem.