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Multi-domain autonomous sensor networks are essential for reducing capability gaps between different kinds of sensing platforms. Design of an efficient network can provide seamless sensing capability. Furthermore, to achieve operational persistency, nodes of the networks are required to be robust and affordable. Field robotics has other challenges in addition to robustness and in particular the logistics...
This paper describes the Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) Simulator, an extension of the open-source robotics simulator Gazebo to underwater scenarios, that can simulate multiple underwater robots and intervention tasks using robotic manipulators. This is achieved mainly through a set of newly implemented plugins that model underwater hydrostatic and hydrodynamic effects, thrusters, sensors, and...
Most of the autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are provided with a main battery to process the on-board software and for the electronic systems. In this case, on-board energy capacity (battery capacity) will limit the operational time of the AUV. Energy depletion may occur at a critical moment during a task execution. In addition, returning the robot to its home-base and recharging the AUV to complete...
We present the design overview and navigation performance for an offshore deployment of a semi-autonomous underwater vehicle (sAUV). The system is based on a commercially-available observation class remotely operated vehicle (ROV), combined with a commercial AUV navigation system. The vehicle also has onboard visual cameras, a Doppler velocity log, and a multibeam imaging sonar. We present the integration...
As the capabilities of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) improve, the missions become longer, riskier, and more complex. For AUVs to succeed in complex missions, they must be reliable in the face of subsystem failure and environmental challenges. In practice, fault detection activities carried out by most AUVs employ a rule-based emergency abort system that is triggered by specific events. AUVs...
Underwater Object Localization is widely used in the industry in Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV), both in sea and lake environments for various applications. Sonars and Cameras are popular choices for this, but each sensor alone poses several problems. Data extraction from Optical Cameras underwater is a challenge due to poor lighting conditions, hazing over large distances and spatio-temporal...
The paper describes the control system development of a novel hybrid autonomous vehicle - Aqua-Quad, a Multi-Rotor Vertical Take Off and Landing aircraft with environmentally hardened electronics, exchangeable sensor suite, communication links, and a solar recharge system. The key objective of this multi-modal autonomous system is to enable energy-aware ultra-long endurance autonomy to facilitate...
The development of a novel hybrid autonomous vehicle, Aqua-Quad, is presented, which combines a multi-rotor vertical take off and landing aircraft with environmentally hardened electronics, exchangeable sensor suite and a solar recharge system in order to provide long endurance sensing in aquatic environments in support of a variety of missions. The vehicle is envisioned to perform sensing below the...
When a mariner navigates into an unfamiliar area, he/she uses a nautical chart to familiarize him/herself with the environment, determine the locations of hazards, and decide upon a safe course of travel. An autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) would gain a great advantage if, like its human counterpart, it can learn to read and use the information from a nautical chart. Electronic Nautical Charts (ENCs)...
Advanced approaches to intelligent, real-time decision making are difficult to test for multi-agent systems. Specifically, the expense and logistics of fielding multiple unmanned underwater vehicles in an open ocean environment are significant challenges in marine autonomy. Traditionally, algorithms may be developed and tested under ideal conditions with tools that do not accurately reflect real-time...
Autonomous underwater robotic vehicles (AUVs) are equipped with monitoring and emergency systems (MESs) to increase the mission success rate. The MES ensures the AUV's safety in water and the fault tolerance of its subsystems. The signals produced by the self-test functionality of robot subsystems as well as the parameters measured by sensors are the source information for the MES. Nowadays, MES actions...
Many types of robotic vehicles are increasingly utilized in both civilian and military maritime missions. Some amount of human supervision is typically present in such operations, thereby ensuring appropriate accountability in case of mission accidents or errors. However, there is growing interest in augmenting the degree of independence of such vehicles, up to and including full autonomy. A primary...
In June 2015, the MARUM - Center of Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen, has put a new 2000 m ROV system into service - the MARUM-Squid. MARUM-Squid, manufactured by SAAB Seaeye (UK), is a “Leopard” type light, electrical workclass ROV. The system was designed as powerful, yet compact ROV system for deployments from small vessels. The complete system can be shipped inside a single...
This paper employs a computational optimal control framework to develop a mission planning tool for a team of heterogeneous unmanned vehicles conducting a nominal mine countermeasures (MCM) mission. We first describe our motivation for developing vehicle-specific sensor models for unmanned surface and underwater vehicles working collaboratively to detect mines. Next, we describe the sonar detection...
The 2015 Gold King Mine spill exposed the Animas River (located in Durango, Colorado) to over 3 million gallons of toxic water with spiked levels of arsenic and lead among other metals. In response to public concern for the quality of the river's water, a water quality monitoring system has been developed and deployed. Multiple organizations, both local and federal, have joined forces to understand...
Innovative robotic technologies are a key to study ocean processes in space and time. The work carried out during the ROBEX-Demonstration Mission on RV Polarstern will test the capability of new and innovative technologies, developed during the HGF Alliance ROBEX, in deep-sea environments. Investigations will include Arctic benthic and pelagic ecosystems strongly influenced by climate change, such...
Advanced Driver Assistance System or ADAS is used in vehicles to make driving as safe as possible. For that reason ADAS uses sensors, lidars, radars and cameras to enable vehicles to perceive everything that surrounds them. So many different components require processing and analyzing large amounts of data. This paper proposes layered architecture for software which collects data from ultrasonic sensors,...
Human-robot interaction involving the failure of autonomous robots is not yet well understood. We conducted two online surveys with a total of 1200 participants in which people assessed situations where an autonomous robot experienced different kinds of failure. This information was used to construct a measurement scale of people's reaction to failure where positive values correspond with increasingly...
This paper presents an autonomous search technique that enables vehicles to uniformly search for moving targets within a recursive Bayesian estimation (RBE) framework. The detailed process of the grid-based method for the search task is introduced: prediction and update steps of the grid-based filter are thoroughly explained. Entropic information is selected as information measure for the optimal...
Chance-constrained control is a difficult problem even if the considered system dynamics are linear. The difficulty stems from the facts that the chance constraints are difficult to evaluate and that the control law is nonlinear due to the constraints. In this paper, we present a novel approach to chance-constrained control, where we solve the unconstrained control problem first and then use a progressive...
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