AMOUR V: A Hovering Energy Efficient Underwater Robot Capable of Dynamic Payloads

Abstract

In this paper we describe the design and control algorithms of AMOUR, a low-cost autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) capable of missions of marine survey and monitoring. AMOUR is a highly maneuverable robot capable of hovering and carrying dynamic payloads during a single mission. The robot can carry a variety of payloads. It uses internal buoyancy and balance control mechanisms to achieve power efficient motions regardless of the payload size. AMOUR is designed to operate in synergy with a wireless underwater sensor network (WUSN) of static nodes. The robot's payload was designed in order to deploy, relocate and recover the static sensor nodes. It communicates with the network acoustically for signaling and localization and optically for data muling. We present control algorithms, navigation algorithms, and experimental data from pool and ocean trials with AMOUR that demonstrate its basic navigation capabilities, power efficiency, and ability to carry dynamic payloads.

Complete SE³ underwater robot control with arbitrary thruster configurations

“…Traditional pitch/roll/yaw controllers work well on these types of configurations. Our robot, AMOUR, is a high degree of freedom robot [1] that can accommodate up to 8 thrusters. Other robots in this class of robots include the University of Hawaii ODIN-III robot [5], the CSIRO Starbug robot [6] and the Bluefin Robotics HAUV [7].…”

“…1 Using unit direction vectors for each thruster we solve for individual thruster errors that when multiplied with each thruster's direction will result in the total translational error.…”

“…The previous versions of AMOUR were presented in [1], [2], [14]. The main improvement in the current version is increased modularity.…”

“…We have developed a small, highly maneuverable, underwater autonomous vehicle called AMOUR [1]. AMOUR is designed to be a flexible underwater platform that can operate in shallow ocean environments.…”

“…The prior version of our robot required a different controller for each of these tasks [1]. The controller had a separate proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control loop Figure 2 and a sixth thruster is attached to the front of the robot to make it fully holonomic.…”