Low-cost Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for pipeline and cable inspections

Abstract

The design considerations of a low-cost quality of acquired data due to the umbilical adaptation of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle perturbation over position is lower, and the cost to be (AUV) devoted to pipeline and cable inspections is invested in the ship and its crew each time an presented in this article. Periodic surveys are need in inspection has to be undertaken is higher. These two the preventive maintenance of submarine unwanted characteristics become enhanced, as the infrastructure of off-shore industries. The advantages surveys depths are greater. For instance, offshore of doing them with AUVs instead of Remote Operated petroleum exploitation is being shifted to deeper Vehicles or Towed Unmanned Devices are low costs and bettr dta ualiy i th insecton issins.Thrugh waters as the resource iS becoming lean. In contrast, a European Project funds (AUVI), the construction of a AUV's allow a smoother and faster navigation (over low-cost prototype for depths of 100m auv was initiated the typical three quarter knots of ROVs), and then a last year. The design considerations and proposed more reliable data acquisition. In fact, an AUV can solutions, as well as a description of the hardware reach positions in global coordinates and navigate in employed, the sensors in the payload, and the mission an autonomous way with low position error, and is replanning module based on an expert system, are able to follow certain sensors readings considering described in this work. Although a complete sea trial is them to plan the desired and possible trajectory to be still pending for the AUVI prototype, some computer followed by the vehicle's control systems. However, and hardware in the loop simulations are briefly there are remaining limitation like the pressure that discussed.the submarine can stand for as depth increases and Keywords -Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV).the endurance in terms of battery power. These are Trajectory planning. Knowledge-based systems. still open problems from the standpoint of new Underwater pipeline inspection. materials. During the last years many successful trials have

Survey of Mission Planning and Management Architectures for Underwater Cooperative Robotics Operations

“…In recent years, the use of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for cooperative robotics in underwater operations has increased. This interest includes their use in military interventions [1][2][3], scientific interventions like the survey and exploration of the Arctic Ocean [4,5], and other marine interventions like, for instance, underwater infrastructure maintenance [6][7][8] and oil spill response [9][10][11]. The essential information structure for these operations has been identified as the mission.…”

Research on autonomous underwater vehicle wall following based on reinforcement learning and multi-sonar weighted round robin mode

“…Nowadays, water conveyance tunnels have been an important transportation route in hydraulic engineering. 1 When detecting the wall crack in the water conveyance tunnels, the ability of following the wall at a certain distance is the basic premise of autonomous underwater vehicle's (AUV's) safe operation. 2 Ranging sonar is widely used in obtaining the distance of obstacles, its principle is the transducer actively emits acoustic waves and obtains the distance information of obstacle by receiving the echo reflected by the obstacle.…”

A Survey on Intermediation Architectures for Underwater Robotics

“…Underwater robotics are gaining momentum as useful tools when issues and challenges spring up regarding maritime operations: infrastructure maintenance [ 1 ], oil spill counter measurements [ 2 ] and survey operations [ 3 ] are only a few of the use cases that these devices have proven to have a major usability in, to the point that not having them severely jeopardizes achieving the objectives pursued during a mission. Underwater robotics comprises a plethora of different vehicles capable of providing different capabilities, such as Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs, working in close cooperation with the former ones) or generally speaking Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) that require little input from a human operator to perform underwater-related tasks.…”