Underwater swarm robotics: Challenges and opportunities

Underwater swarm robotics today faces a series of challenges unique to its aquatic environment. This chapter explores some possible applications of underwater swarm robotics and its challenges. Those challenges include the environment itself, sensor types required, problems with communication and the difficulty in localisation. It notes the serious challenges in underwater communication is that radio communications is practically non-existent in the underwater realm. Localisation also becomes problematic due to the lack of radio waves as GPS cannot be used. It also looks at the platforms required by underwater robots and includes a possible low-cost platform. Also explored is a method of swarm robotics control known as consensus control. It shows possible solutions to the challenges and where swarm robotics may head

Underwater Robotics

Underwater Robotics or Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) is a project that involves research and implement of the robots prototype. ROV are commonly used in oil and gas industries for pipeline inspection and maintenance which involve dangerous task and high risk enviromnent. Besides that it also used for underwater exploration and research for marine scientist. Due to that. research and development on ROV is important in order to improve and extend the capabilities of the ROV. The scope of study for this project is to design and build a fully working prototype of ROV which involve testing the prototype designed, circuit design and simulation, waterproofing components and programming the hardware. The capability and feasibility of the designed prototype is tested using several methods, for example testing the buoyancy of the ROV by applying the Archimedes principles. The focus of this project is to design build a small working prototype which capable of manoeuvring under the water and do monitoring task using a less degree of complex technologies and with a cheaper cost. The ROV also will be able to send any data to the computer via UART protocol while under the water

A survey on uninhabited underwater vehicles (UUV)

ASME Early Career Technical Conference, ASME ECTC, October 2-3, 2009, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USAThis work presents the initiation of our underwater robotics research which will be focused on underwater vehicle-manipulator systems. Our aim is to build an underwater vehicle with a robotic manipulator which has a robust system and also can compensate itself under the influence of the hydrodynamic effects. In this paper, overview of the existing underwater vehicle systems, thruster designs, their dynamic models and control architectures are given. The purpose and results of the existing methods in underwater robotics are investigated

Deep Learning for Visual Navigation of Underwater Robots

This paper aims to briefly survey deep learning methods for visual navigation of underwater robotics. The scope of this paper includes the visual perception of underwater robotics with deep learning methods, the available visual underwater datasets, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning methods for navigation. Additionally, relevant works will be categorized under the imitation learning or deep learning paradigm for underwater robots for clarity of the training methodologies in the current landscape. Literature that uses deep learning algorithms to process non-visual data for underwater navigation will not be considered, except as contrasting examples