Autonomous Underwater Vehicles: Localization, Navigation, and Communication for Collaborative Missions

Josué González-García,Jesús Arturo Escobedo Cabello,Tomás Salgado-Jiménez,Alfonso Gómez-Espinosa,Luis Govinda García-Valdovinos,Enrique Cuan-Urquizo

doi:10.3390/app10041256

Abstract

Development of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) has permitted the automatization of many tasks originally achieved with manned vehicles in underwater environments. Teams of AUVs designed to work within a common mission are opening the possibilities for new and more complex applications. In underwater environments, communication, localization, and navigation of AUVs are considered challenges due to the impossibility of relying on radio communications and global positioning systems. For a long time, acoustic systems have been the main approach for solving these challenges. However, they present their own shortcomings, which are more relevant for AUV teams. As a result, researchers have explored different alternatives. To summarize and analyze these alternatives, a review of the literature is presented in this paper. Finally, a summary of collaborative AUV teams and missions is also included, with the aim of analyzing their applicability, advantages, and limitations.

Highlights

Over the years, a large number of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are being designed to accomplish a wide range of applications in the scientist, commercial, and military areas
The results showed a cumulative error of 1000 m at the end of the trajectory for the loosely coupled coupled (LC) approach and only 10 m in the tightly coupled coupled (TC) case
Technology to avoid collisions in AUV formations, especially when they are navigating in a few meters of each other

Summary

Introduction

A large number of AUVs are being designed to accomplish a wide range of applications in the scientist, commercial, and military areas. AUVs have become very popular to explore, collect data, and to create 3D reconstructions or maps [1,2]. At the oil and gas industry, AUVs inspect and repair submerged infrastructures and have great potential in search, recognition, and localization tasks like airplane black-boxes recovery missions [3,4]. AUVs are used for port and harbor security tasks such as environmental inspection, surveillance, detection and disposal of explosives and minehunting [5,6]

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Results

Conclusion