Agile design of low-cost autonomous underwater vehicles

Phillips, Alexander B.; Gold, Naomi; Linton, Nick; Harris, Catherine A.; Richards, Ella; Templeton, Robert; Thuné, Sebastian; Sitbon, Jeremy; Muller, M.H.; Vincent, Iain; Sloane, Terry

doi:10.1109/oceanse.2017.8084772

Cited by 17 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…• physical layer, represented by the nano-modems [51]; • data link layer, granting access to the acoustic channel by means of a configurable medium access control (MAC) policy. The user can select the MAC policy among the available ones, namely TDMA and Carrier-Sense Multiple Access (CSMA); • network layer, providing basic addressing to each node;…”

Section: A Successful Case Study: the Low-cost Auv Technology (Lcat) Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptable Underwater Networks: The Relation between Autonomy and Communications

et al. 2020

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This paper discusses requirements for autonomy and communications in maritime environments through two use cases which are sourced from military scenarios: Mine Counter Measures (MCM) and Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW). To address these requirements, this work proposes a service-oriented architecture that breaks the typical boundaries between the autonomy and the communications stacks. An initial version of the architecture has been implemented and its deployment during a field trial done in January 2019 is reported. The paper discusses the achieved results in terms of system flexibility and ability to address the MCM and ASW requirements.

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Section: A Successful Case Study: the Low-cost Auv Technology (Lcat) Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptable Underwater Networks: The Relation between Autonomy and Communications

et al. 2020

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“…The past few years has seen the rise of a new generation of low-cost and miniature underwater vehicle, driven by further improvements in the miniaturization of computation and sensing, as well as advances in additive manufacturing -in particular, 3D printing has enabled rapid development and testing of these miniature AUVs, such as the Riptide micro-AUV, the eco-SUB [190], and the Bluefin SandShark [189]. These AUVs have a diameter between 10 cm and 15 cm and a length of 1-2 m, with a weight of 10 kg to 20 kg.…”

Section: A New Generation: Low-cost and Miniature Auvs And Rovsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Consumer ROVs, such as the Blue Robotics BlueROV2, have also emerged, providing a platform inexpensive enough for the average hobbyist to acquire. These miniature and low-cost underwater robots hold the potential to democratize underwater robotics, but their low-cost and small size prevent the use of traditional navigational and acoustic sensors, limiting their utility as a result of their low navigational performance [190] [152] [153].…”

Section: A New Generation: Low-cost and Miniature Auvs And Rovsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Underwater and out of sight: Towards ubiquity in underwater robotics

Rypkema¹

2019

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The Earth's oceans holds a wealth of information currently hidden from us. Effective measurement of its properties could provide a better understanding of our changing climate and insights into the creatures that inhabit its waters. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) hold the promise of penetrating the ocean environment and uncovering its mysteries; and progress in underwater robotics research over the past three decades has resulted in vehicles that can navigate reliably and operate consistently, providing oceanographers with an additional tool for studying the ocean.Unfortunately, the high cost of these vehicles has stifled the democratization of this technology. We believe that this is a consequence of two factors. Firstly, reliable navigation on conventional AUVs has been achieved through the use of a sophisticated sensor system, namely the Doppler velocity log (DVL)-aided inertial navigation system (INS), which drives up vehicle cost, power use and size. Secondly, deployment of these vehicles is expensive and unwieldy due to their complexity, size and cost, resulting in the need for specialized personnel for vehicle operation and maintenance.The recent development of simpler, low-cost, miniature underwater robots provides a solution that mitigates both these factors; however, removing the expensive DVL-aided INS means that they perform poorly in terms of navigation accuracy. We address this by introducing a novel acoustic system that enables AUV self-localization without requiring a DVL-aided INS or on-board active acoustic transmitters. We term this approach Passive Inverted Ultra-Short Baseline (piUSBL) positioning. The system uses a single acoustic beacon and a time-synchronized, vehicle-mounted, passive receiver array to localize the vehicle relative to this beacon. Our approach has two unique advantages: first, a single beacon lowers cost and enables easy deployment; second, a passive receiver allows the vehicle to be low-power, low-cost and small, and enables multi-vehicle scalability.Providing this new generation of small and inexpensive vehicles with accurate navigation can potentially lower the cost of entry into underwater robotics research and further its widespread use for ocean science. We hope that these contributions in low-cost underwater navigation will enable the ubiquitous and coordinated use of robots to explore and understand the underwater domain.

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“…1: The SAM AUV in field tests at Askö, Sweden product development [6], [7], [8]. In related work, networks of small hydrobatic AUVs have been proposed for a variety of challenging missions [9], [10], [1]. The key idea therein is that the use of less expensive hardware tightly integrated in a network can bring down costs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Cyber-Physical System for Hydrobatic AUVs: System Integration and Field Demonstration

Bhat

Torroba

Özkahraman

et al. 2020

2020 IEEE/OES Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Symposium (AUV)(50043)

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Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) comprise a network of sensors and actuators that are integrated with a computing and communication core. Hydrobatic Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) can be efficient and agile, offering new use cases in ocean production, environmental sensing and security. In this paper, a CPS concept for hydrobatic AUVs is validated in realworld field trials with the hydrobatic AUV SAM developed at the Swedish Maritime Robotics Center (SMaRC). We present system integration of hardware systems, software subsystems for mission planning using Neptus, mission execution using behavior trees, flight and trim control, navigation and dead reckoning. Together with the software systems, we show simulation environments in Simulink and Stonefish for virtual validation of the entire CPS. Extensive field validation of the different components of the CPS has been performed. Results of a field demonstration scenario involving the search and inspection of a submerged Mini Cooper using payload cameras on SAM in the Baltic Sea are presented. The full system including the mission planning interface, behavior tree, controllers, dead-reckoning and object detection algorithm is validated. The submerged target is successfully detected both in simulation and reality, and simulation tools show tight integration with target hardware.

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Agile design of low-cost autonomous underwater vehicles

Cited by 17 publications

References 5 publications

Adaptable Underwater Networks: The Relation between Autonomy and Communications

Adaptable Underwater Networks: The Relation between Autonomy and Communications

Underwater and out of sight: Towards ubiquity in underwater robotics

A Cyber-Physical System for Hydrobatic AUVs: System Integration and Field Demonstration

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