Design, construction, and operation of an unmanned underwater vehicle

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2009.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (leaf [62]).The practical usage of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) is limited by vehicle and operation cost, difficulty in accurate navigation, and communication between the vehicle and operator. The "Rex 2" UUV employs a system design where a submersible is connected to a float at the water's surface by means of a tether. By maintaining a surface expression, high-bandwidth radio communication to the operator becomes possible, and GPS may be used for accurate navigation. This arrangement allows the freedom of movement characteristic of untethered autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), while maintaining the live operator control and communication found with tethered remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). Expanding on the design and field experiences with the MIT AUV Lab's first Reef Explorer UUV, Rex 2 was designed to be inexpensive, easy to deploy, adaptable to various payloads, and simple to use. Rex 2 was designed, built, and operated in a number of ocean field tests, validating the utility of the vehicle and system concept.by Dylan Owens.S.M

Progressively communicating rich telemetry from autonomous underwater vehicles via relays

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution June 2012As analysis of imagery and environmental data plays a greater role in mission construction and execution, there is an increasing need for autonomous marine vehicles to transmit this data to the surface. Without access to the data acquired by a vehicle, surface operators cannot fully understand the state of the mission. Communicating imagery and high-resolution sensor readings to surface observers remains a significant challenge – as a result, current telemetry from free-roaming autonomous marine vehicles remains limited to ‘heartbeat’ status messages, with minimal scientific data available until after recovery. Increasing the challenge, longdistance communication may require relaying data across multiple acoustic hops between vehicles, yet fixed infrastructure is not always appropriate or possible. In this thesis I present an analysis of the unique considerations facing telemetry systems for free-roaming Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) used in exploration. These considerations include high-cost vehicle nodes with persistent storage and significant computation capabilities, combined with human surface operators monitoring each node. I then propose mechanisms for interactive, progressive communication of data across multiple acoustic hops. These mechanisms include wavelet-based embedded coding methods, and a novel image compression scheme based on texture classification and synthesis. The specific characteristics of underwater communication channels, including high latency, intermittent communication, the lack of instantaneous end-to-end connectivity, and a broadcast medium, inform these proposals. Human feedback is incorporated by allowing operators to identify segments of data thatwarrant higher quality refinement, ensuring efficient use of limited throughput. I then analyze the performance of these mechanisms relative to current practices. Finally, I present CAPTURE, a telemetry architecture that builds on this analysis. CAPTURE draws on advances in compression and delay tolerant networking to enable progressive transmission of scientific data, including imagery, across multiple acoustic hops. In concert with a physical layer, CAPTURE provides an endto- end networking solution for communicating science data from autonomous marine vehicles. Automatically selected imagery, sonar, and time-series sensor data are progressively transmitted across multiple hops to surface operators. Human operators can request arbitrarily high-quality refinement of any resource, up to an error-free reconstruction. The components of this system are then demonstrated through three field trials in diverse environments on SeaBED, OceanServer and Bluefin AUVs, each in different software architectures.Thanks to the National Science Foundation, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for their funding of my education and this work

Reference Model for Interoperability of Autonomous Systems

This thesis proposes a reference model to describe the components of an Un-manned Air, Ground, Surface, or Underwater System (UxS), and the use of a single Interoperability Building Block to command, control, and get feedback from such vehicles. The importance and advantages of such a reference model, with a standard nomenclature and taxonomy, is shown. We overview the concepts of interoperability and some efforts to achieve common refer-ence models in other areas. We then present an overview of existing un-manned systems, their history, characteristics, classification, and missions. The concept of Interoperability Building Blocks (IBB) is introduced to describe standards, protocols, data models, and frameworks, and a large set of these are analyzed. A new and powerful reference model for UxS, named RAMP, is proposed, that describes the various components that a UxS may have. It is a hierarchical model with four levels, that describes the vehicle components, the datalink, and the ground segment. The reference model is validated by showing how it can be applied in various projects the author worked on. An example is given on how a single standard was capable of controlling a set of heterogeneous UAVs, USVs, and UGVs

Disruptive Technologies with Applications in Airline & Marine and Defense Industries

Disruptive Technologies With Applications in Airline, Marine, Defense Industries is our fifth textbook in a series covering the world of Unmanned Vehicle Systems Applications & Operations On Air, Sea, and Land. The authors have expanded their purview beyond UAS / CUAS / UUV systems that we have written extensively about in our previous four textbooks. Our new title shows our concern for the emergence of Disruptive Technologies and how they apply to the Airline, Marine and Defense industries. Emerging technologies are technologies whose development, practical applications, or both are still largely unrealized, such that they are figuratively emerging into prominence from a background of nonexistence or obscurity. A Disruptive technology is one that displaces an established technology and shakes up the industry or a ground-breaking product that creates a completely new industry.That is what our book is about. The authors think we have found technology trends that will replace the status quo or disrupt the conventional technology paradigms.The authors have collaborated to write some explosive chapters in Book 5:Advances in Automation & Human Machine Interface; Social Media as a Battleground in Information Warfare (IW); Robust cyber-security alterative / replacement for the popular Blockchain Algorithm and a clean solution for Ransomware; Advanced sensor technologies that are used by UUVs for munitions characterization, assessment, and classification and counter hostile use of UUVs against U.S. capital assets in the South China Seas. Challenged the status quo and debunked the climate change fraud with verifiable facts; Explodes our minds with nightmare technologies that if they come to fruition may do more harm than good; Propulsion and Fuels: Disruptive Technologies for Submersible Craft Including UUVs; Challenge the ammunition industry by grassroots use of recycled metals; Changing landscape of UAS regulations and drone privacy; and finally, Detailing Bioterrorism Risks, Biodefense, Biological Threat Agents, and the need for advanced sensors to detect these attacks.https://newprairiepress.org/ebooks/1038/thumbnail.jp

WTEC panel report on research submersibles and undersea technologies

This report covers research submersibles and related subsea technologies in Finland, France, Russia, Ukraine and the United Kingdom. Manned, teleoperated, and autonomous submersibles were of interest. The panel found that, in contrast to the United States, Europe is making substantial progress in cooperative and coordinated research in subsea technology, including the development of standards. France is a leader in autonomous vehicle technology. Because much less was known a priori about the technologies in Russia and Ukraine, there were more new findings in those countries than in those Western European nations visited. However, Russia and Ukraine have a sizeable (and currently underutilized) infrastructure in this field, including a highly educated and experienced manpower pool, impressive (in some cases unique) facilities for physical testing, extensive fleets of seagoing research vessels capable of long voyages, and state-of-the-art facilities for conducting oceanographic investigations. The panel visited newly-formed commercial companies associated with long-standing submersible R&D and production centers in Russia and Ukraine. So far, these new efforts are undercapitalized, and as such represent opportunities at very low cost for Western nations, as detailed in the site reports

Lossy compression and real-time geovisualization for ultra-low bandwidth telemetry from untethered 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 September 2008Oceanographic applications of robotics are as varied as the undersea environment itself. As underwater robotics moves toward the study of dynamic processes with multiple vehicles, there is an increasing need to distill large volumes of data from underwater vehicles and deliver it quickly to human operators. While tethered robots are able to communicate data to surface observers instantly, communicating discoveries is more difficult for untethered vehicles. The ocean imposes severe limitations on wireless communications; light is quickly absorbed by seawater, and tradeoffs between frequency, bitrate and environmental effects result in data rates for acoustic modems that are routinely as low as tens of bits per second. These data rates usually limit telemetry to state and health information, to the exclusion of mission-specific science data. In this thesis, I present a system designed for communicating and presenting science telemetry from untethered underwater vehicles to surface observers. The system's goals are threefold: to aid human operators in understanding oceanographic processes, to enable human operators to play a role in adaptively responding to mission-specific data, and to accelerate mission planning from one vehicle dive to the next. The system uses standard lossy compression techniques to lower required data rates to those supported by commercially available acoustic modems (O(10)-O(100) bits per second). As part of the system, a method for compressing time-series science data based upon the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is explained, a number of low-bitrate image compression techniques are compared, and a novel user interface for reviewing transmitted telemetry is presented. Each component is motivated by science data from a variety of actual Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) missions performed in the last year.National Science Foundation Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging (CenSSIS ERC

Advances in integrating autonomy with acoustic communications for intelligent networks of marine robots

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution February 2013Autonomous marine vehicles are increasingly used in clusters for an array of oceanographic tasks. The effectiveness of this collaboration is often limited by communications: throughput, latency, and ease of reconfiguration. This thesis argues that improved communication on intelligent marine robotic agents can be gained from acting on knowledge gained by improved awareness of the physical acoustic link and higher network layers by the AUV’s decision making software. This thesis presents a modular acoustic networking framework, realized through a C++ library called goby-acomms, to provide collaborating underwater vehicles with an efficient short-range single-hop network. goby-acomms is comprised of four components that provide: 1) losslessly compressed encoding of short messages; 2) a set of message queues that dynamically prioritize messages based both on overall importance and time sensitivity; 3) Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) Medium Access Control (MAC) with automatic discovery; and 4) an abstract acoustic modem driver. Building on this networking framework, two approaches that use the vehicle’s “intelligence” to improve communications are presented. The first is a “non-disruptive” approach which is a novel technique for using state observers in conjunction with an entropy source encoder to enable highly compressed telemetry of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) position vectors. This system was analyzed on experimental data and implemented on a fielded vehicle. Using an adaptive probability distribution in combination with either of two state observer models, greater than 90% compression, relative to a 32-bit integer baseline, was achieved. The second approach is “disruptive,” as it changes the vehicle’s course to effect an improvement in the communications channel. A hybrid data- and model-based autonomous environmental adaptation framework is presented which allows autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) with acoustic sensors to follow a path which optimizes their ability to maintain connectivity with an acoustic contact for optimal sensing or communication.I wish to acknowledge the sponsors of this research for their generous support of my tuition, stipend, and research: the WHOI/MIT Joint Program, the MIT Presidential Fellowship, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) # N00014-08-1-0011, # N00014-08-1-0013, and the ONR PlusNet Program Graduate Fellowship, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (Deep Sea Operations: Applied Physical Sciences (APS) Award # APS 11-15 3352-006, APS 11-15-3352-215 ST 2.6 and 2.7

Underwater Vehicles

For the latest twenty to thirty years, a significant number of AUVs has been created for the solving of wide spectrum of scientific and applied tasks of ocean development and research. For the short time period the AUVs have shown the efficiency at performance of complex search and inspection works and opened a number of new important applications. Initially the information about AUVs had mainly review-advertising character but now more attention is paid to practical achievements, problems and systems technologies. AUVs are losing their prototype status and have become a fully operational, reliable and effective tool and modern multi-purpose AUVs represent the new class of underwater robotic objects with inherent tasks and practical applications, particular features of technology, systems structure and functional properties

NASA Thesaurus. Volume 1: Hierarchical listing

There are 16,713 postable terms and 3,716 nonpostable terms approved for use in the NASA scientific and technical information system in the Hierarchical Listing of the NASA Thesaurus. The generic structure is presented for many terms. The broader term and narrower term relationships are shown in an indented fashion that illustrates the generic structure better than the more widely used BT and NT listings. Related terms are generously applied, thus enhancing the usefulness of the Hierarchical Listing. Greater access to the Hierarchical Listing may be achieved with the collateral use of Volume 2 - Access Vocabulary

Internet of Underwater Things and Big Marine Data Analytics -- A Comprehensive Survey

The Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) is an emerging communication ecosystem developed for connecting underwater objects in maritime and underwater environments. The IoUT technology is intricately linked with intelligent boats and ships, smart shores and oceans, automatic marine transportations, positioning and navigation, underwater exploration, disaster prediction and prevention, as well as with intelligent monitoring and security. The IoUT has an influence at various scales ranging from a small scientific observatory, to a midsized harbor, and to covering global oceanic trade. The network architecture of IoUT is intrinsically heterogeneous and should be sufficiently resilient to operate in harsh environments. This creates major challenges in terms of underwater communications, whilst relying on limited energy resources. Additionally, the volume, velocity, and variety of data produced by sensors, hydrophones, and cameras in IoUT is enormous, giving rise to the concept of Big Marine Data (BMD), which has its own processing challenges. Hence, conventional data processing techniques will falter, and bespoke Machine Learning (ML) solutions have to be employed for automatically learning the specific BMD behavior and features facilitating knowledge extraction and decision support. The motivation of this paper is to comprehensively survey the IoUT, BMD, and their synthesis. It also aims for exploring the nexus of BMD with ML. We set out from underwater data collection and then discuss the family of IoUT data communication techniques with an emphasis on the state-of-the-art research challenges. We then review the suite of ML solutions suitable for BMD handling and analytics. We treat the subject deductively from an educational perspective, critically appraising the material surveyed.Comment: 54 pages, 11 figures, 19 tables, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, peer-reviewed academic journa