A Multi‐Autonomous Underwater Vehicle System for Autonomous Tracking of Marine Life

Abstract

This paper presents a multi‐autonomous underwater vehicle system capable of cooperatively and autonomously tracking and following marine targets (i.e., fish) tagged with an acoustic transmitter. The AUVs have been equipped with stereo‐hydrophones that receive signals broadcasted by the acoustic transmitter tags to enable real‐time calculation of bearing‐to‐tag and distance‐to‐tag measurements. These measurements are shared between AUVs via acoustic modem and fused within each AUV's particle filter for estimating the target's position. The AUVs use a leader/follower multi‐AUV control system to enable the AUVs to drive toward the estimated target state by following collision‐free paths. Once within the local area of the target, the AUVs circumnavigate the target state until it moves to another area. The system builds on previous work by incorporating a new SmartTag package that can be attached to an individual's dorsal fin. The SmartTag houses a full inertial measurement unit (INU), video logger, acoustic transmitter, and timed release mechanism. After real‐time AUV tracking experiments, the SmartTag is recovered. Logged IMU data are fused with logged AUV‐obtained acoustic tag measurements within a particle filter to improve state estimation accuracy. This improvement is validated through a series of multi‐AUV shark and boat tracking experiments conducted at Santa Catalina Island, California. When compared with previous work that did not use the SmartTag package, results demonstrated a decrease in mean position estimation error of 25–75%, tag orientation estimation errors dropped from 80° to 30° , the sensitivity of mean position error with respect to distance to the tag was less by a factor of 50, and the sensitivity of mean position error with respect to acoustic signal reception frequency to the tag was 25 times less. These statistics demonstrate a large improvement in the system's robustness when the SmartTag package is used.

Factors affecting detection efficiency of mobile telemetry Slocum gliders

“…One solution to this challenge is near-real-time triangulation of the acoustic signal using a combination synthetic aperture and known test tag locations [7]. Another solution is using a combination of stereo receivers and near-realtime particle filtering [8], and multiple AUVs to geolocate the acoustic tag on meter scales [9]. These approaches…”

Tracking the Movements of Juvenile Chinook Salmon using an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle under Payload Control

“…Maneuvers conducted in response to detection events can enhance the accuracy of location estimates, and the ability of the AUV to move closer to the fish to collect proximal information on habitat use and the associated environmental conditions has obvious advantages. AUVs can also work in cooperative pairs [46], and eventually swarms, to enhance the information collected [47,48].…”

A Single-Way Ranging Localization of AUVs Based on PSO of Outliers Elimination

“…It easily leads to and V by substituting (1), (2) into 11; then the OWTT of a signal traveling from the vehicle (at ) to transponder and the OWTT from transponder to the vehicle (at 3 ) can be further solved by combining (3). Note that the vehicle orientation may have changed when the vehicle receives the reply from transponder , as shown in Figure 2.…”

“…In a three-dimensional underwater environment, the problem of localization of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) has been widely investigated in recent years, as they make it accessible to those untouchable areas for human beings and assist with complex and arduous underwater tasks, which has important theory and application value in various robotic applications, such as the underwater target detection [1], the underwater target tracking [2,3], and underwater search and rescue missions [4,5]. Localization is one of the key components that enable the autonomy of AUVs.…”