BathyBoat: An Autonomous Surface Vessel for Stand-alone Survey and Underwater Vehicle Network Supervision

Abstract

A B S T R A C TExploration of remote environments, once the domain of intrepid adventurers, can now be conducted in relative safety using unmanned vehicles. This article describes the joint University of Michigan (UMich) and Michigan Tech Research Institute's project to design and to build a new autonomous surface vessel (ASV) for use in research, education, and resource management as well as in the commercial sector.Originally designed to assist with bathymetric surveys in the wilderness of northern Alaska, the BathyBoat has become a test-bed platform for new research in collaborative heterogeneous underwater robotic search and survey missions in ports, harbors, lakes, and rivers. The UMich Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratories are actively researching autonomous technologies such as cooperative navigation, surface vessel control, and multivehicle search and survey using the BathyBoat and the UMich Perceptual Robotics Laboratory's Iver2 autonomous underwater vehicles.This article presents an overview of these research topics and highlights relevant real-world testing and recent missions involving the BathyBoat ASV on Alaska's North Slope, the harbors of Illinois, and various riverine environments in Michigan.

Technical note: Bathymetry observations of inland water bodies using a tethered single-beam sonar controlled by an unmanned aerial vehicle

“…Furthermore, the highly oblique scan angles of TLS make refraction effects more problematic (Woodget et al, 2015) and decrease returns from the bottom while increasing returns from the water surface (Bangen et al, 2014). Therefore, field surveys are normally performed using single-beam or multi-beam swath sonars transported on manned boats or more recently on unmanned vessels (e.g., Brown et al, 2010;Ferreira et al, 2009;Giordano et al, 2015) . However, boats cannot be employed along unnavigable rivers and require sufficient water depth for navigation.…”

On Exploring Data Forwarding Problem in Opportunistic Underwater Sensor Network Using Mobility-Irregular Vehicles

“…OMSNs can achieve large scale sensing at a lower cost compared to an ubiquitous static infrastructure of sensing devices, nevertheless, owing to the mobility of nodes, available contacts between nodes might be scarce and short, hence the communication paths may not be stable. A special case of OMSNs is opportunistic underwater sensor networks (OUSNs), which are the technology that enables various underwater applications especially underwater vehicle networks [8], underwater creatures tracking Fig. 1.…”

Current status and prospects of marine renewable energy applied in ocean robots

“…Ocean robots have been regarded as one of the most important tools for understanding and exploring ocean, especially in those dangerous and inaccessible places (for instance, harsh or underwater high‐pressure environment). At present, ocean robots have been successfully applied in many marine areas, such as submarine resource exploitation (manganese nodule, hydrothermal deposits, etc), hydrographic survey, pipeline inspection, ocean observation, military applications (mine clearance, anti‐submarine warfare, etc), and so on. This paper summarizes the application of MRE in ocean robots and presents the important significance of improving ocean robots' endurance by introducing MRE, which will provide a reference for MRE development and ocean robot construction in future research related to marine engineering technology.…”