Navigation And Control Of Autonomous Marine Vehicles

Robotic marine vessels can be used for a wide range of purposes, including defence, marine science, offshore energy and hydrographic surveys, and environmental surveys and protection. Such vessels need to meet a variety of criteria: they must be able to operate in salt water, and to communicate and be controlled over large distances, even when submerged or in inclement weather. Further challenges include 3D navigation of individual vehicles, groups or squadrons. This book covers the current state of research in navigation, modelling and control of marine autonomous vehicles, and deals with various related topics, including collision avoidance, communication, and a range of applications. It provides valuable insights for an audience of researchers, academics and postgraduate students interested in autonomous marine vessels, robotics, and electrical and automobile engineering.

This book covers the current state of research in navigation, modelling and control of marine autonomous vehicles, and deals with various related topics, including collision avoidance, communication, and a range of applications.

This edited volume includes thoroughly collected on sensing and control for autonomous vehicles. Guidance, navigation and motion control systems for autonomous vehicles are increasingly important in land-based, marine and aerial operations. Autonomous underwater vehicles may be used for pipeline inspection, light intervention work, underwater survey and collection of oceanographic/biological data. Autonomous unmanned aerial systems can be used in a large number of applications such as inspection, monitoring, data collection, surveillance, etc. At present, vehicles operate with limited autonomy and a minimum of intelligence. There is a growing interest for cooperative and coordinated multi-vehicle systems, real-time re-planning, robust autonomous navigation systems and robust autonomous control of vehicles. Unmanned vehicles with high levels of autonomy may be used for safe and efficient collection of environmental data, for assimilation of climate and environmental models and to complement global satellite systems. The target audience primarily comprises research experts in the field of control theory, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

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.

Thomas Glotzbach spotlights that navigation within marine robotics can benefit from cooperative teams in a way that justifies the increased effort to operate several vehicles at once. He features discussions of different scenarios, modeling of systems, and estimation algorithms for comparable situations. The chapter on the used methodologies may allow a reader with only basic knowledge in control theory to obtain deeper insight in advanced concepts such as observability and state estimation, even without any background in marine robotics.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of marine control system design related to underwater robotics applications. In particular, it presents novel optimization-based model predictive control strategies to solve control problems appearing in autonomous underwater vehicle applications. These novel approaches bring unique features, such as constraint handling, prioritization between multiple design objectives, optimal control performance, and robustness against disturbances and uncertainties, into the control system design. They therefore form a more general framework to design marine control systems and can be widely applied. Advanced Model Predictive Control for Autonomous Marine Vehicles balances theoretical rigor – providing thorough analysis and developing provably-correct design conditions – and application perspectives – addressing practical system constraints and implementation issues. Starting with a fixed-point positioning problem for a single vehicle and progressing to the trajectory-tracking and path-following problem of the vehicle, and then to the coordination control of a large-scale multi-robot team, this book addresses the motion control problems, increasing their level of challenge step-by-step. At each step, related subproblems such as path planning, thrust allocation, collision avoidance, and time constraints for real-time implementation are also discussed with solutions. In each chapter of this book, compact and illustrative examples are provided to demonstrate the design and implementation procedures. As a result, this book is useful for both theoretical study and practical engineering design, and the tools provided in the book are readily applicable for real-world implementation.

Unmanned marine vehicles (UMVs) is a collective term which can be used to describe autonomous underwater vehicles, remotely operated vehicles, semisubmersibles, and unmanned surface craft. These days there is considerable interest being shown in UMVs by the military, civilian and scientific communities for undertaking designated missions whilst either operating autonomously and/or in cooperation with other types of vehicle. More and more worldwide importance is also being placed on the design and development of such vehicles as they are capable of providing cost effective solutions to a number of littoral, coastal and offshore problems. This new book on the subject will cover topics including Navigation guidance and control of the following unmanned marine vehicles: remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), ncluding gliders, autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs).

This book presents an Intelligent Control Architecture (ICA) to enable multiple collaborating marine vehicles to autonomously carry out underwater intervention missions. The presented ICA is generic in nature but aimed at a case study where a marine surface craft and an underwater vehicle are required to work cooperatively. It is shown that they are capable of cooperating autonomously towards the execution of complex activities since they have different but complementary capabilities. The ICA implementation is verified in simulation, and validated in trials by means of a team of autonomous marine robots. This book also presents architectural details and evaluation scenarios of the ICA, results of simulations and trials from different maritime operations, and future research directions.