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Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) are a proven tool for performing highly-capable marine operations ranging from science investigations to industrial applications. While industry-grade ROVs can support an impressive array of functions, they can be very expensive and complex. As such, they are often inappropriate for use in educational programs where functional requirements are limited but low-cost...
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employs many technologies in its diverse missions. NOAA challenges include monitoring the atmosphere and predicting the weather, charting the Nation's waterways, protecting marine sanctuaries, managing fisheries resources and exploring and understanding our ocean planet. In an era of strained budgets and declining availability of conventional...
Robotic chemical plume tracing is a growing area of research, with envisioned real-world applications including pollution tracking, search and rescue, and ecosystem identification. However, following a chemical signal in the water is not an easy task due to the nature of chemical transport and to limitations in sensing and communication. In this paper, we propose an approach for near-surface waterborne...
We often take Web connectivity for granted. This can be the case in our houses where we rely on more and more devices that connect to the Internet and exchange information with remote servers or other nearby devices around using cheap Wi-Fi radios. However, the world remains for the most part disconnected. There are still uncountable remote areas where connecting to the Internet is still a big challenge...
Unmanned Maritime Vehicles (UMVs) have been under development, especially with US Navy research funds, for decades. However, meaningful advances in the commercial sector have only been seen in the past 20 years. In 1997 Bluefin Robotics was formed out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sea Grant College Program Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Lab. Since then many other companies have developed...
This paper addresses a three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of a flooded open pit mine with an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The ROAZ USV and the Otus UAV were used to provide the underwater bathymetric map and aerial 3D reconstruction based from image data. This work was performed within the context of the European research project VAMOS with the objective of...
The present paper describes the development of geophysical navigation (GN) methods for small, affordable underwater robotic vehicles. The proposed GN methods includes a classical, bathymetric-based terrain-aided navigation (TAN) approach, a magnetic-based geophysical navigation solution (MAGNAV), and an integration of both methods (TAN-MAGNAV). Due to insufficient topographic features in the adopted...
Clean water is a natural resource that is crucial for life but has very little protection. This was exemplified by the Gold King Mine spill on August 7, 2015, in which three million gallons of acidic mine drainage was released into the head waters of the Animas River. The Animas River is the source for five water supply systems, providing drinking water for tens of thousands of people and irrigation...
Analytical model by considering the kinematics, dynamics, and energetics of the trenching machine is adopted and proposed to design an underwater chain trenching machine at UCRC-KIOST. In this paper, parameter study and sensitivity analysis is conducted to show how the variations of operational and geometric parameters, as well as cutting tools and material condition affect the forces, moment, weight,...
This paper presents a new concept for a deep sea lander system combining both sea bottom permanence characteristics with autonomous repositioning functionalities and efficient ascent/descent motion in the water column.
For the ONR-funded Heterogeneous Adaptive Maritime Mobile Expeditionary Robots (HAMMER) project, we work on cooperative autonomy for a fleet of unmanned vehicles working together in the aerial, water surface, and underwater domains. Each of these systems work well independently, but our goal is to integrate their performance into one system of vehicles that can safely perform cooperative tasks. The...
In April 2016, NTNU, FFI, Kongsberg Seatex, LSTS and Maritime Robotics set up an experiment to explore their capability to combine the research vessel Gunnerus, the AUV Hugin, the UAV X8 and the USV Mariner in a network of heterogeneous unmanned vehicles. Communication, manoeuvring, onboard processing and operational complexity are essential components in such networks. To provide communication the...
Underwater communication and robot technologies have grown rapidly in the last decade. Systems made of underwater unmanned vehicles have moved from single vehicle deployments to systems comprising teams of assets. As of today the possibility to support cooperation and interoperability of heterogeneous platforms is a key issue. The objective of this paper is to present the SUNRISE [1] approach to overcome...
This paper presents “ROVBus,” a communications framework tailored to custom ROV development, that enables plug-and-play interconnection of various component tools via a unified communications bus. The flexibility provided by this approach enables easy custom tooling for various ROV frameworks and allows them to be tailored to a range of applications. The paper will describe the ROVBus system architecture...
This paper presents the design and development of a new Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). SHAD, which stands for Small Hovering AUV with Differential actuation, is a torpedo shaped vehicle that was conceptually designed to navigate in challenging volumes. It brings to the scene of submarine robotics a different model and new design of AUV. The small size, the light weight and the high maneuverability...
The three-years European FP7 ARROWS project (ARchaeological RObot systems for the World's Seas) concluded at the end of August 2015. A heterogeneous team of cooperating AUVs has been created in the framework of ARROWS: these are both new prototypes and well known commercial vehicles. In the paper MARTA modular AUV is described: MARTA is a new prototype specifically designed during the project. Its...
Motion planning for service robots used for human assistance in complex environments is a challenging task with multifaceted requirements. On the one hand, the generated path has to avoid obstacles and satisfy the user requirements. On the other, the generated path has to be perceived as comfortable by the user. An efficient solution to this difficult problem is based on a separation of concerns between...
In this paper, we propose a central coordination system to compute optimized trajectories of intelligent vehicles in a double lane road with traffic lights. The focus is to decrease travel time when comparing to human drivers traffic. First, we predict the waiting line formation order when vehicles approach traffic lights. Then, we compute a global motion plan in order to force trajectories result...
Safety is of particular interest when performing research related to human-robot interaction in unpredictable and hazardous underwater environment. Special attention is devoted to safety requirements within FP7 project “CADDY — Cognitive Autonomous Diving Buddy” in order to reduce hazards during experiments, since divers relying on technology for life support are exposed to additional risk of trauma...
This paper addresses the problem of controlling an electric powered wheelchair in dynamic, crowded areas. Navigating the vehicle effectively in such environmental conditions requires two issues to be considered: Relatively long term prediction of pedestrians' motion and an influence of the vehicle motion on the people behaviour in its vicinity. The purpose of this study is to develop a method that...
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