AUV/ASC cooperative survey

In this paper we describe a solution to perform autonomous surveys taking advantage of a cooperative multivehicle setup. In the proposed configuration, an ASC provides –through an USBL- absolute positioning and communications to an AUV. Thus, by following the AUV with the surface vehicle we facilitate the reception of USBL measurements in the AUV regardless of the extent of the mission. This turns into an improved navigation on the AUV’s side, with the drift bounded thanks to the absolute measurements. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is able to maintain the ASC at a close distance and improve the navigation of the AUV. Moreover, the bathymetric maps built from the AUV data are consistent enough to enable the automatic detection of present targets and program further localized missions in the area.Peer Reviewe

Design of a Mobile Underwater Charging System

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are extremely capable vehicles for numerous ocean related missions. AUVs are energy limited, resulting in short mission endurance on the scale of hours to days. Underwater Gliders (UGs) are able to operate on the order of months to years by using nontraditional propulsion methods. UGs, however, are unable to perform missions requiring high speed or direct forward motion due to the nature of their buoyancy driven motion. This work reviews the current state of the art in recharging AUVs and offers an underwater recharging network concept at a significantly reduced cost to traditional methods. The solution includes the design of a UG capable of serving as charge carrying agent that couples with and charges AUVs autonomously. The vehicle design is built on the work done previously at the Nonlinear and Autonomous Systems Lab on the development of ROUGHIE (Research Oriented Underwater Glider for Hands-on Investigative Engineering). The ROUGHIE2 design is a rethinking of the original ROUGHIE capabilities to serve as a mobile charger by increasing depth rating, endurance, and payload capacity. The recharging concept presented will be easy to adapt to many different AUVs and UGs making this technology universal to small AUVs

Cooperative Navigation for Low-bandwidth Mobile Acoustic Networks.

This thesis reports on the design and validation of estimation and planning algorithms for underwater vehicle cooperative localization. While attitude and depth are easily instrumented with bounded-error, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have no internal sensor that directly observes XY position. The global positioning system (GPS) and other radio-based navigation techniques are not available because of the strong attenuation of electromagnetic signals in seawater. The navigation algorithms presented herein fuse local body-frame rate and attitude measurements with range observations between vehicles within a decentralized architecture. The acoustic communication channel is both unreliable and low bandwidth, precluding many state-of-the-art terrestrial cooperative navigation algorithms. We exploit the underlying structure of a post-process centralized estimator in order to derive two real-time decentralized estimation frameworks. First, the origin state method enables a client vehicle to exactly reproduce the corresponding centralized estimate within a server-to-client vehicle network. Second, a graph-based navigation framework produces an approximate reconstruction of the centralized estimate onboard each vehicle. Finally, we present a method to plan a locally optimal server path to localize a client vehicle along a desired nominal trajectory. The planning algorithm introduces a probabilistic channel model into prior Gaussian belief space planning frameworks. In summary, cooperative localization reduces XY position error growth within underwater vehicle networks. Moreover, these methods remove the reliance on static beacon networks, which do not scale to large vehicle networks and limit the range of operations. Each proposed localization algorithm was validated in full-scale AUV field trials. The planning framework was evaluated through numerical simulation.PhDMechanical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113428/1/jmwalls_1.pd

Scientific challenges and present capabilities in underwater robotic vehicle design and navigation for oceanographic exploration under-ice.

This paper reviews the scientific motivation and challenges, development, and use of underwater robotic vehicles designed for use in ice-covered waters, with special attention paid to the navigation systems employed for under-ice deployments. Scientific needs for routine access under fixed and moving ice by underwater robotic vehicles are reviewed in the contexts of geology and geophysics, biology, sea ice and climate, ice shelves, and seafloor mapping. The challenges of under-ice vehicle design and navigation are summarized. The paper reviews all known under-ice robotic vehicles and their associated navigation systems, categorizing them by vehicle type (tethered, untethered, hybrid, and glider) and by the type of ice they were designed for (fixed glacial or sea ice and moving sea ice). © 2020 by the authors

Information Aided Navigation: A Review

The performance of inertial navigation systems is largely dependent on the stable flow of external measurements and information to guarantee continuous filter updates and bind the inertial solution drift. Platforms in different operational environments may be prevented at some point from receiving external measurements, thus exposing their navigation solution to drift. Over the years, a wide variety of works have been proposed to overcome this shortcoming, by exploiting knowledge of the system current conditions and turning it into an applicable source of information to update the navigation filter. This paper aims to provide an extensive survey of information aided navigation, broadly classified into direct, indirect, and model aiding. Each approach is described by the notable works that implemented its concept, use cases, relevant state updates, and their corresponding measurement models. By matching the appropriate constraint to a given scenario, one will be able to improve the navigation solution accuracy, compensate for the lost information, and uncover certain internal states, that would otherwise remain unobservable.Comment: 8 figures, 3 table

Decentralized cooperative trajectory estimation for autonomous underwater vehicles

Autonomous agents that can communicate and make relative measurements of each other can improve their collective localization accuracies. This is referred to as cooperative localization (CL). Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) CL is constrained by the low throughput, high latency, and unreliability of of the acoustic channel used to communicate when submerged. Here we propose a CL algorithm specifically designed for full trajectory, or maximum a posteriori, estimation for AUVs. The method is exact and has the advantage that the broadcast packet sizes increase only linearly with the number of AUVs in the collective and do not grow at all in the case of packet loss. The approach allows for AUV missions to be achieved more efficiently since: 1) vehicles waste less time surfacing for GPS fixes, and 2) payload data is more accurately localized through the smoothing approach.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaDefense Research and Development CanadaUnited States. Office of Naval Research (Grant N00014-13-1-0588

Design considerations for engineering autonomous underwater vehicles

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution June 2007Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have been established as a viable tool for Oceanographic Sciences. Being untethered and independent, AUVs fill the gap in Ocean Exploration left by the existing manned submersible and remotely operated vehicles (ROV) technology. AUVs are attractive as cheaper and efficient alternatives to the older technologies and are breaking new ground in many applications. Designing an autonomous vehicle to work in the harsh environment of the deep ocean comes with its set of challenges. This paper discusses how the current engineering technologies can be adapted to the design of AUVs. Recently, as the AUV technology has matured, we see AUVs being used in a variety of applications ranging from sub-surface sensing to sea-floor mapping. The design of the AUV, with its tight constraints, is very sensitive to the target application. Keeping this in mind, the goal of this thesis is to understand how some of the major issues affect the design of the AUV. This paper also addresses the mechanical and materials issues, power system design, computer architecture, navigation and communication systems, sensor considerations and long term docking aspects that affect AUV design. With time, as the engineering sciences progress, the AUV design will have to change in order to optimize its performance. Thus, the fundamental issues discussed in this paper can assist in meeting the challenge of maintaining AUV design on par with modern technology.This work was funded by the NSF Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems (CenSSIS) Engineering Research Center (ENC) grant no. EEC-99868321