Introduction to autonomy for marine robots

Abstract

An unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) or autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is a marine robot [1] used for a wide range of oceanographic and military tasks including underwater surveys, inspection of submerged structures, tracking oceanographic features, undersea mapping, laying undersea cable, searching for downed aircraft, and finding naval sea mines, to name but a few. An unmanned surface vehicle (USV) is also categorized as a marine robot; however, most of this book is concerned with UUVs. In terms of physical shape, UUVs can be the traditional torpedo-shaped bodies as shown in Fig. 1 or an underwater glider such as that seen in Fig. 2. At the lowest level of control, UUVs operate with closed-loop control for basic actions such as maintaining depth, pitch, roll, and heading. As an extension to this capability, UUVs can also line-follow between a series of waypoints while logging data from mission sensors, as well as sensors that monitor the UUV status and functionality. Such basic actions can be grouped into behaviours.