Fast and Ultra-Wide Area Bathymetric Survey System Without Support Vessel

Abstract

Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) operations require manned support vessel for communication, navigation, deployment, and recovery. Because the number of the support vessel is limited, the strong tie between AUV and support vessel prevents to operate many AUVs simultaneously. Since this problem has been shared in oceanic markets, we propose a compact and mobile package of multi-robot system to realize fast and ultra-wide area bathymetric survey without support vessel. The proposed system consists of several numbers of AUVs, single autonomous surface vehicle (ASV), and ground mission control. The proposed system includes an unmanned deploy and recovery system, which enables towing, deploying and recovering multiple AUVs by an ASV without manned support vessel. The three AUVs can equip different payloads and basically follow the order of forming a convoy from the ASV which is also supervised by operators at a remote ground base station. Satellites communications are used between the ground base station and the ASV, and acoustic communications are used between the ASV and the ASVs. The proposed system has been developed and implemented. Several sea-trials had been conducted to confirm the validity of the proposed system. In this paper, we introduce the overall design concept of the proposed system and the recent activities.