The ARTEMIS under‐ice AUV docking system

Abstract

The ARTEMIS docking system demonstrates autonomous docking capability applicable to robotic exploration of sub‐ice oceans and sub‐glacial lakes on planetary bodies, as well as here on Earth. In these applications, melted or drilled vertical access shafts restrict vehicle geometry as well as the in‐water infrastructure that may be deployed. The ability of the vehicle to return reliably and precisely to the access point is critical for data return, battery charging, and/or vehicle recovery. This paper presents the mechanical, sensor, and software components that make up the ARTEMIS docking system, as well as results from field deployment of the system to McMurdo Sound, Antarctica in the austral spring of 2015. The mechanical design of the system allows the vehicle to approach the dock from any direction and to pitch up after docking for recovery through a vertical access shaft. It uses only a small volume of in‐water equipment and may be deployed through a narrow vertical access shaft. The software of the system reduces position estimation error with a hierarchical combination of dead reckoning, acoustic aiding, and machine vision. The system provides critical operational robustness, enabling the vehicle to return autonomously and precisely to the access shaft and latch to the dock with no operator input.

Exo-Ocean Exploration with Deep-Sea Sensor and Platform Technologies

“…Underwater vehicle autonomy is presently implemented through permanent docking at cabled observatories (Wirtz et al, 2012;Hildebrandt et al, 2017). Such docking capabilities, similar to stationary ROVs presently used by the deep-sea oil industry, will allow AUVs to perform depthrated water column ascents or descents from beneath ice shell locations (e.g., ARTEMIS docking; Kimball et al, 2018). A similar concept of remote control is represented by the Europa Underwater Probe ''Icefin.''…”

Docking Control of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Using Reinforcement Learning

“…for a fixed platform with state vector η p . In reality, the velocity vector in the body-fixed frame and the pitch angle in the inertial frame are computed from the accelerometer and gyrocompass on the AUV, whereas the relative position and velocity vectors in the inertial frame are determined from either visual or sonic sensors (with lights or beacons sited on the platform, as, for instance, described by the authors of [10,12]).…”

“…The docking onto a fixed underwater platform for easier maintenance work was investigated by Palomeras et al [11]. A docking station for under-ice operations was considered by Kimball et al [12], where the station rests on top of the ice and the AUV has to approach it from a vertical opening in the ice. Docking operations onto a moving platform have been considered conceptually for the retrieval of AUVs from submarines [13][14][15].…”

“…The docking of an AUV onto a moving platform is investigated in [18]. On the other hand, many experimental studies have been conducted, which focus on the localisation of the AUV, the estimation of its relative position and orientation with respect to the docking station and the analysis of the acoustic and visual sensors that best enable these solutions [8][9][10][11][12][19][20][21][22]. In most of these studies, advanced simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) computer-vision strategies are coupled with line-of-sight guidance and classical control algorithms, such as proportional-integral-derivative (PID) and sliding-mode (SM) control.…”

Visual Navigation for Recovering an AUV by Another AUV in Shallow Water

“…Active contact means that AUVs actively connect to docking stations with the help of custom mechanisms. A common kind of active contact is that AUVs catch a cable [5,8] or pole [11,12,13] with an incorporated custom latch or hook. This form allows AUVs to approach the cable or pole in any direction, but requires additional space to install the mechanism on the AUVs, which limits the wide application to a range of AUVs.…”