Preliminary design and fast prototyping of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle propulsion system

Abstract

The Mechatronics and Dynamic Modelling Laboratory of the Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Florence, as a partner of THESAURUS (Italian acronym for ‘TecnicHe per l’Esplorazione Sottomarina Archeologica mediante l’Utilizzo di Robot aUtonomi in Sciami’) project, has developed an innovative low-cost, multirole autonomous underwater vehicle, called Tifone. This article deals with the adopted methodologies for the autonomous underwater vehicle design: in particular, the main focus of this study is related to its propulsion system. According to the expected performances and requirements of THESAURUS project, the vehicle has to maintain good autonomy and efficiency (typical features of an autonomous underwater vehicle), with high manoeuvrability and hovering capabilities, which are more common of remotely operated vehicles. Moreover, cooperative underwater exploration and surveillance involve the use of a swarm of vehicles. In particular, the optimization of costs versus benefits is achieved through the design of a fleet of three multirole vehicles. Each autonomous underwater vehicle has five controlled degrees of freedom, thanks to four thrusters and two propellers: in this article, the preliminary design criteria concerning the vehicle and the design and testing of its actuation system are described

Single axis FOG aided attitude estimation algorithm for mobile robots

“…The performance of the proposed filter has been tested on the Typhoon AUV [14,15], developed and built by the MDM Lab of the University of Florence (visible in Fig. 11 during a sea trial) in the framework of the THESAURUS 3 and the ARROWS 4 [23] projects.…”

An innovative decentralized strategy for I-AUVs cooperative manipulation tasks

“…These sensors are typical for ROVs and AUVs: e.g. they are some of the ones mounted on the Typhoon class AUV [40,41], developed and built by the University of Florence in the framework of the THESAURUS project. For the cooperative control architecture some of them have been modelled using the real features and performance to increase the accuracy of the proposed algorithm with respect to real scenario conditions.…”

Reconfigurable propulsion systems for the inspection of off-shore power generation plants

“…This work is based on the experience acquired by authors in the prototyping of hybrid multi-role AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles) TIFONE [3], [4], [5] and MARTA [6], [7], whose propulsion layout is visible in Figure 2. In these vehicles, two rear propellers are used for standard-straight navigation and a certain number of tunneled thrusters are devoted to control orientation or to keep the vehicle hovering over an assigned target.…”