engleski

Guidance and control of autonomous underwater agents with acoustically aided navigation

The research area of marine robotics is becoming popular as the need to understand the marine environment (underwater and surface), both for scientific and economic reasons, increases. Substantial number of research groups around the world contribute to marine robotics research, by developing their own underwater and surface autonomous marine platforms for testing envisioned scenarios and algorithms. The thesis research focuses on navigation, guidance, control infrastructures and methodologies required for cooperative control of underwater vehicles. A toolset is proposed for navigation, guidance, and control of marine vessels, adapting to different vessels and sensor suites, enabling integration of delayed and asynchronous measurements from local and remote sensor sources. The toolset is applied to remote sonar-based localization of small unmanned underwater vehicles. This concept is further combined with path following and target tracking algorithms, resulting in a diver tracking and localization aiding system of systems. A modified path stabilization controller is presented, capable of safe movement around and with the diver. It implements diver monitoring and tracking functionalities, and, combined with absolute positioning, a diver guidance feature is available. The thesis proposes an incremental experiment design methodology aimed at reducing development time and improving reproducibility. This methodology is used for design of final benchmark experiments for the proposed diver tracking and guidance systems. Results are presented from simulation incremental up to field results with real divers.

unmanned underwater vehicles ; human-robot interaction ; navigation ; guidance and control of underwater vehicles ; diver tracking

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