Further Advances In Unmanned Marine Vehicles

The following topics are dealt with: unmanned marine vehicles; ROV LATIS; next generation smart underwater vehicle; neural network-based switching adaptive control; dynamic positioning system; dynamic tracking system; port-Hamiltonian control; sonar-based simultaneous localization and mapping; vehicle-following; fault-tolerant multi-sensor navigation system design; multiple autonomous marine vehicles; hybrid glider; biomimetic underwater vehicle design concept; and robotic fish.

Unmanned marine vehicles (UMVs) include autonomous underwater vehicles, remotely operated vehicles, semi-submersibles and unmanned surface craft. Considerable importance is being placed on the design and development of such vehicles, as they provide cost-effective solutions to a number of littoral, coastal and offshore problems. This book highlights the advanced technology that is evolving to meet the challenges being posed in this exciting and growing area of research.

Unmanned marine vehicles (UMVs) is a collective term commonly used to describe autonomous underwater vehicles, remotely operated vehicles, semi-submersibles, and unmanned surface craft. UMVs are heavily used in the military, civilian, and scientific communities for undertaking designated missions whilst either operating autonomously and/or in co-operation with other types of vehicles. Advanced marine vehicles are increasing their capabilities and the degree of autonomy more and more in order to perform more sophisticated maritime missions. Remotely operated vehicles are no longer cost-effective since they are limited by economic support costs, and the presence and skills of the human operator. Alternatively, autonomous surface and underwater vehicles have the potential to operate with greatly reduced overhead costs and level of operator intervention. An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft without a human pilot aboard. UAVs are a component of an unmanned aircraft system (UAS); these include a UAV, a ground-based controller, and a system of communications between the two. Compared to manned aircraft, UAVs were originally used for missions too "dull, dirty or dangerous" for humans. While they originated mostly in military applications, their use is rapidly expanding to commercial, scientific, recreational, agricultural, and other applications such as policing, peacekeeping and surveillance, product deliveries, aerial photography, agriculture, smuggling, and drone racing. Civilian UAVs now vastly outnumber military UAVs, with estimates of over a million sold by 2015, so they can be seen as an early commercial application of Autonomous Things, to be followed by the autonomous car and home robots. Nowadays, UMVs and UAVs are playing an increasingly important role in both controlling community and engineering applications. For example, UMVs and UAVs provide more efficient ways to execute various challenging tasks. However, these systems are usually featured with dynamics coupling, actuator saturation, underactuated structure, time-varying disturbance, etc., thereby resulting in great challenges and difficulties in system analysis and controller design. Recently, by employing intelligent approaches, advanced control methodologies for unmanned systems have been rapidly developed. Note that the dynamic environment is usually changing and the unmanned systems must adapt themselves accordingly. In this context, on one hand, more efforts should be focused on the methodology of the learning system. For example, fast adaptation and self-organizing capability are essentially required. On the other hand, advanced analysis tools should be deployed to enhance the control performance. Towards this end, human-like intelligence should be integrated tightly with nonlinear design for complex control tasks of autonomous systems. The main objective of this edited book is to address various challenges and issues pertinent to the intelligent control of UMVs and UAVs. (Nova)

The two-volume set LNCS 8111 and LNCS 8112 constitute the papers presented at the 14th International Conference on Computer Aided Systems Theory, EUROCAST 2013, held in February 2013 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. The total of 131 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the books. The contributions are organized in topical sections on modelling biological systems; systems theory and applications; intelligent information processing; theory and applications of metaheuristic algorithms; model-based system design, verification and simulation; process modeling simulation and system optimization; mobile and autonomous transportation systems; computer vision, sensing, image processing and medical applications; computer-based methods and virtual reality for clinical and academic medicine; digital signal processing methods and applications; mechatronic systems, robotics and marine robots; mobile computing platforms and technologies; systems applications.

The biennial Congress of the Italian Society of Oral Pathology and Medicine (SIPMO) is an International meeting dedicated to the growing diagnostic challenges in the oral pathology and medicine field. The III International and XV National edition will be a chance to discuss clinical conditions which are unusual, rare, or difficult to define. Many consolidated national and international research groups will be involved in the debate and discussion through special guest lecturers, academic dissertations, single clinical case presentations, posters, and degree thesis discussions. The SIPMO Congress took place from the 17th to the 19th of October 2019 in Bari (Italy), and the enclosed copy of Proceedings is a non-exhaustive collection of abstracts from the SIPMO 2019 contributions.

Autonomy for Marine Robots provides a timely and insightful overview of intelligent autonomy in marine robots. A brief history of this emerging field is provided, along with a discussion of the challenges unique to the underwater environment and their impact on the level of intelligent autonomy required. Topics covered at length examine advanced frameworks, path-planning, fault tolerance, machine learning, and cooperation as relevant to marine robots that need intelligent autonomy.

Until recently, the prevailing view of marine life at high latitudes has been that organisms enter a general resting state during the dark Polar Night and that the system only awakens with the return of the sun. Recent research, however, with coordinated, multidisciplinary field campaigns based on the high Arctic Archipelago of Svalbard, have provided a radical new perspective. Instead of a system in dormancy, a new perspective of a system in full operation and with high levels of activity across all major phyla is emerging. Examples of such activities and processes include: Active marine organisms at sea surface, water column and the sea-floor. At surface we find active foraging in seabirds and fish, in the water column we find a high biodiversity and activity of zooplankton and larvae such as active light induced synchronized diurnal vertical migration, and at seafloor there is a high biodiversity in benthic animals and macroalgae. The Polar Night is a period for reproduction in many benthic and pelagic taxa, mass occurrence of ghost shrimps (Caprellides), high abundance of Ctenophores, physiological evidence of micro- and macroalgal cells that are ready to utilize the first rays of light when they appear, deep water fishes found at water surface in the Polar night, and continuous growth of bivalves throughout the winter. These findings not only begin to shape a new paradigm for marine winter ecology in the high Arctic, but also provide conclusive evidence for a top-down controlled system in which primary production levels are close to zero. In an era of environmental change that is accelerated at high latitudes, we believe that this new insight is likely to strongly impact how the scientific community views the high latitude marine ecosystem. Despite the overwhelming darkness, the main environmental variable affecting marine organisms in the Polar Night is in fact light. The light regime during the Polar Night is unique with respect to light intensity, spectral composition of light and photoperiod.

Experimental Robotics XV is the collection of papers presented at the International Symposium on Experimental Robotics, Roppongi, Tokyo, Japan on October 3-6, 2016. 73 scientific papers were selected and presented after peer review. The papers span a broad range of sub-fields in robotics including aerial robots, mobile robots, actuation, grasping, manipulation, planning and control and human-robot interaction, but shared cutting-edge approaches and paradigms to experimental robotics. The readers will find a breadth of new directions of experimental robotics. The International Symposium on Experimental Robotics is a series of bi-annual symposia sponsored by the International Foundation of Robotics Research, whose goal is to provide a forum dedicated to experimental robotics research. Robotics has been widening its scientific scope, deepening its methodologies and expanding its applications. However, the significance of experiments remains and will remain at the center of the discipline. The ISER gatherings are a venue where scientists can gather and talk about robotics based on this central tenet.