Design and Testing of a Spherical Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for Shipwreck Interior Exploration

Abstract

This article details the design, construction and implementation of a novel, spherical unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) prototype for operations within confined, entanglement-prone marine environments. The nature of shipwreck interiors, the exploration of which the vehicle was originally designed, imposes special risks that constrain system requirements while promoting other attributes uncommon in typical open-water UUV designs. The invention, the Wreck Interior Exploration Vehicle (WIEVLE), was constructed using 3-D additive manufacturing technology combined with relatively inexpensive commercial components. Similar inventions are compared, followed by a thorough review of the physical and functional characteristics of the system. The key attributes of the design include a smooth, spherical hull with 360-degree sensor coverage, and a fixed, upward-angled thruster core, relying on inherent buoyancy to take the place of a dedicated depth-changing mechanism. Initial open-loop control testing demonstrated stable 4[M2] degrees of freedom (DOF) maneuvering capability. The article concludes with an overview of the results of the initial testing, a review of how the key system design attributes address the unique shipwreck interior exploration challenges, and a plan for the future development of the platform.

Underwater Light Field Retention : Neural Rendering for Underwater Imaging

“…Motivated by the high quality of StyleGAN [22,23], which performs exceptionally well on image editing and processing tasks. Based on the StyleGAN, Elad et al [12] presented an end-to-end training method for learning a mapping from images to StyleGAN latent codes to generate high-quality images. Chong et al [9] allowed StyleGAN to directly start various tasks through pre-training and a little operation on the latent space.…”

“…The underwater environment and resource has been gradually developed and explored in the last decade [6,14,24,12,21]. Unlike the terrestrial environment, it is hard for us to obtain satisfactory paired underwater datasets, limiting the development of many underwater vision tasks.…”

Recent Advancement of Data-Driven Models in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

“…Similarly, Ross et al [55] also built an underwater oil and gas pipeline monitoring system, which is required for the monitoring of an actuator mechanism. The various military and security applications utilize event-driven data models such as performing port and harbor control and monitoring, sea mine identification, border security from unauthorized battleships or submarines, and decentralized situational surveillance, military, and defense applications, which employ a mix of underwater sensors to look for possible threats early [56,57].…”

Motion Planning for Vibration Reduction of a Railway Bridge Maintenance Robot with a Redundant Manipulator

“…In recent decades, an increasing number of outdoor autonomous robots have been developed to release humans from high-risk operations in complex environments [1]. Most of the studies have focused on designing climbing mechanisms and studying adhesion methods to move on the surfaces of various structures, but have neglected the manipulation functions of robots; therefore, the potential applications of existing outdoor robots are limited to surveillance and inspection [2][3][4][5][6][7]. For example, Huang et al [3] proposed a tracked climbing robot for ship inspection in shipbuilding.…”

“…Muthugala et al designed an adhesion-aware façade cleaning Robot [5] and developed a self-organizing fuzzy logic classifier for benchmarking Robot-Aided blasting of ship hulls [6]. Eldred et al [7] designed a novel, spherical unmanned underwater vehicle prototype for operations within confined, entanglement-prone marine environments. To perform complex maintenance operations on railway bridges, we have combined a redundant manipulator with a biped climbing mobile platform to devise a robot named CMBOT [8].…”