Cornell AUVSI Competition Entry 2005
This paper presents the 2005 Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) designed by the Cornell University AUV Team. This year's vehicle builds on the team's previous iterations and maintains the aspects that have proven to be successful in the past, including a dual hull structure, brushless motors, explicit separation of hardware by functionality, and flexible software. Significant improvements made this year include a modular sensor infrastructure, signal and power backplanes, enhanced power management, and improved vehicle control.
Modular hardware infrastructure for autonomous underwater vehicles
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are taking on increasingly visible and valuable roles in oceanographic research institutions, the offshore industry, and the military (Podder et al., 2004 and Yongkuan, 2002). AUV research, especially at the university level, is hindered by the lack of flexible and affordable platforms suitable for a wide range of applications. This paper presents an electrical and mechanical infrastructure developed to improve the flexibility and modularity of research AUVs. External devices can be added or replaced with minimal vehicle modification. A power backplane offers built-in monitoring and switching for all electronic devices. A signal backplane allows new electronics to be quickly integrated into the existing system. Easily detachable segments make the entire system mechanically modular.
AUV systems research at the NRC-IOT: an update
This paper provides general information on autonomous underwater systems (vehicles). The associated ideas lead directly to considerations that affect the design of fully-autonomous vehicles. We include a discussion of some of the engineering, logistical and systems-integration aspects of autonomous operations, including the use of multiple vehicles in a coordinated "fleet". We outline some of the technical challenges associated with working within a limited energy budget and mention some possible strategies for vehicle-to-vehicle communications and for vehicle-network configurations and management. The results from this research permit the planners and developers of autonomous vehicle systems to better allocate such limited assets in order to provide more effective operations in hazardous environments. We describe the design of one instance of such a vehicle, in the form of a highly-manoeuvrable autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). We also describe our initial successes and lessons learned, and, our plans for subsequent development of the AUV "C-SCOUT" and its role as a prototype member of a small "fleet" of AUVs. We describe some parallel work-in-progress that has commercial application in support of the Canadian East Coast offshore oil and gas industry. This work involves a single AUV carrying suitable sensors to detect and quantify the presence of certain chemicals in ocean water samples.