The Zipangu of the Sea Project Overview: Focusing on the R&D for Simultaneous Deployment and Operation of Multiple AUVs

Abstract

This paper presents the overview of a R&D project "Zipangu of the Sea", focusing on the sub-R&D project supervised by National Maritime Research Institute of Japan. Consisting of 7 sub-projects, main object of the Zipangu of the Sea project is the development of core technologies required for exploring, investigating, monitoring, protecting, and developing benthic mineral resources. The project is a collaborative R&D conducted by national institutes, universities, and private companies in Japan. The NMRI of Japan leads a sub-R&D project of developing the system and strategy for simultaneous deployment and operation of multiple AUVs. In this sub-project, AUVs play a leading role as a cutting-edge undersea probe. Supervised by an USV, multiple AUVs form a fully-autonomous undersea survey unit. In this paper, we introduce a new benthic resource survey system consisting of multiple AUVs and an USV being developed by R&D association led by NMRI. Key technologies as well as hardware elements consisting of our system are also overviewed.

Survey on the Developments of Unmanned Marine Vehicles: Intelligence and Cooperation

“…Figure 9 shows an example of a UUV–USV cooperating system. Furthermore, efforts have been made to improve the performance of UUV–USV cooperation [ 18 , 19 ]. McMahon et al [ 20 ] allowed the AUV to achieve its goal by increasing the sum of the rewards so that it can inspect as many targets as possible within the communication range of the USV.…”

“…This follows the path determined by the roadmap using motion tree expansion. Kim et al [ 19 ] described a project called Zipangu of the Sea. The USV oversees several AUVs, and the AUV strives to construct a completely autonomous underwater survey device.…”

“…A new heterogeneous swarm surveillance system that goes beyond a single platform and monitors the entire area in cooperation with UAVs, UGVs, USVs, and UUVs has been actively studied [ 5 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 ]. From a single platform, the fields of land, sea, air, space, electromagnetics, and networks are increasingly becoming interconnected in the battlespace, transforming into a multiplatform combat mode of multiple environments [ 20 ], as shown in Figure 1 .…”

Deep-Sea Underwater Cooperative Operation of Manned/Unmanned Submersible and Surface Vehicles for Different Application Scenarios

“…The "Zipangu of the sea" project proposed a regional underwater positioning and communication system comprising a semi-submersible USV, a hovering AUV, and three surface buoys to support multi-AUV cluster operations [31,32]. The semi-submersible USV was used as a moving surface relay system for positioning and communication.…”