Abstract
We present a new Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) system for cooperative environmental sensing. The AUV was specifically developed as a platform for distributed, cooperative sensing in lakes and coastal areas. In this paper we describe the prerequisite subsystems for a submersible multi-robot system and their interactions. In particular, we incorporate a distributed acoustic localisation system and distributed time-sliced communication systems into an agile, 5-DOF submersible robot that is small, easy to deploy and retrieve, with a modular environmental sensor payload for relevant scientific measurements. We also developed a distributed Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulation framework to facilitate early testing of algorithms in simulation while running final binary code on the actual robot hardware. To avoid communication overhead and real-time issues, the simulation of the vehicle dynamics and all proprioceptive sensors is performed on-board. Exteroceptive sensors are simulated by vehicle-to-vehicle communication where possible, supported by a central simulation supervisor where required. Finally, we present some preliminary experimental results of the system.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been financially supported over multiple years by the following sponsors (in chronological order): National Competence Center in Research on Mobile Information and Communication Systems (NCCR-MICS), a center supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant number 51NF40-111400, through the Spin Fund project “Serafina - Large Scale Underwater Exploration using Groups of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles”; Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation under Grant No. 16348.1 PFES-ES; the Technology Transfer Office of EPFL, through the Enabling Grant No. TTO 6.1419; FEEL Foundation supported by Ferring Pharmaceuticals, under the project “Ladoga - Life under ice”; and the Swiss National Science Foundation under the Sinergia Grant No. CRSII2_160726/1.
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Schill, F., Bahr, A., Martinoli, A. (2018). Vertex: A New Distributed Underwater Robotic Platform for Environmental Monitoring. In: Groß, R., et al. Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73008-0_47
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73008-0_47
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