Autonomous underwater vehicles - challenging developments and technological maturity towards strategic swarm robotics systems

ABSTRACT

Reliable power supply, precise position determination and effective communication are the key requirements for strategic autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) involved in long duration scientific missions, search operations and when operated as a swarm. The paper presents the challenging range of AUV developed for deep water, Polar and intervention applications; demanding technical requirements for strategic AUV; reliability modeling done on the lithium-ion batteries to identify the redundancy requirements for achieving near-zero failures; navigation model to estimate the achievable level of position accuracies using the state-of-the-art navigation system; limitations in underwater communication; and their importance in realizing vehicle autonomy and swarm intelligence. It is identified that a strategic grade Doppler velocity- aided inertial navigation system could provide position accuracies of about 0.5% of the distance travelled when navigated using sea bottom or ice reference, and a 38 kWh lithium-ion battery pack requires about 7% redundant battery capacity to achieve a failure probability of < 1% in a period of 1 year.

KEYWORDS:

• Autonomy
• AUV
• lithium-ion
• navigation
• optical
• swarm

Additional information

Funding

We thank the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India in funding this study under the Unmanned Underwater Vehicle Program. We also thank Dr. Satheesh C. Shenoi (Director, NIOT) and Dr M. A. Atmanand (Former Director, NIOT) and members of the Deep Sea Technologies group of NIOT for constant motivation and support.