A supercavitating vehicle, a next-generation underwater vehicle capable of changing the paradigm of modern marine warfare, exploits supercavitation as a means to reduce drag and achieve extremely high submerged speeds. In supercavitating flows, a low-density gaseous cavity entirely envelops the vehicle and as a result the vehicle is in contact with liquid water only at its nose and partially over the afterbody. Hence, the vehicle experiences a substantially reduced skin drag and can achieve much higher speed than conventional vehicles. The development of a controllable and maneuvering supercavitating vehicle has been confronted with various challenging problems such as the potential instability of the vehicle, the unsteady nature of cavity dynamics, the complex and non-linear nature of the interaction between vehicle and cavity. Furthermore, major questions still need to be resolved regarding the basic configuration of the vehicle itself, including its control surfaces, the control system, and the cavity dynamics. In order to answer these fundamental questions, together with many similar ones, this dissertation develops an integrated simulation-based design tool to optimize the vehicle configuration subjected to operational design requirements, while predicting the complex coupled behavior of the vehicle for each design configuration. Particularly, this research attempts to include maneuvering flight as well as various operating trim conditions directly in the vehicle configurational optimization. This integrated approach provides significant improvement in performance in the preliminary design phase and indicates that trade-offs between various performance indexes are required due to their conflicting requirements. This dissertation also investigates trim conditions and dynamic characteristics of supercavitating vehicles through a full 6 DOF model. The influence of operating conditions, and cavity models and their memory effects on trim is analyzed and discussed. Unique characteristics are identified, e.g. the cavity memory effects introduce a favorable stabilizing effect by providing restoring fins and planing forces. Furthermore, this research investigates the flight envelope of a supercavitating vehicle, which is significantly different from that of a conventional vehicle due to different hydrodynamic coefficients as well as unique operational conditions.

Marine search and rescue activities have been plagued with the problem of risking the lives of rescuers in rescue operations. With increasing developments in sensor technologies, it became a necessity in the marine search and rescue community to develop an autonomous marine craft to assist in rescue operations. Autonomy of marine craft requires a robust localization technique and process. To apply robust localization to marine craft, GPS technology was used to determine the position of the marine craft at any given point in time. Given that the operational environment of the marine was at open air, river, sea etc. GPS signal was always available to the marine craft as there are no obstructions to GPS signal. Adequate cognizance of the current position and states of an unmanned marine craft was a critical requirement for navigation of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV). The unmanned surface vehicle uses GPS in conjunction with state estimated solution provided by inertial sensors. In the absence of the GPS signal, navigation is resumed with a digital compass and inertial sensors to such a time when the GPS signal becomes accessible. GPS based navigation can be used for an unmanned marine craft with the mathematical modelling of the craft meeting the functional requirements of an unmanned marine craft. A low cost GPS unit was used in conjunction with a low cost inertial measurement unit (IMU) with sonar for obstacle detection. The use of sonar in navigation algorithm of marine craft was aimed at surveillance of the operational environment of the marine craft to detect obstacles on its path of motion. Inertial sensors were used to determine the attitude of the marine craft in motion. / Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2011.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Joint Program in Applied Ocean Science and Engineering (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering; and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 275-284). / This research presents a parallel hypothesis method for autonomous underwater vehicle navigation that enables a vehicle to expand the operating envelope of existing long baseline acoustic navigation systems by incorporating information that is not normally used. The parallel hypothesis method allows the in-situ identification of acoustic multipath time-of-flight measurements between a vehicle and an external transponder and uses them in real-time to augment the navigation algorithm during periods when direct-path time-of-flight measurements are not available. A proof of concept was conducted using real-world data obtained by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Deep Submergence Lab's Autonomous Benthic Explorer (ABE) and Sentry autonomous underwater vehicles during operations on the Juan de Fuca Ridge. This algorithm uses a nested architecture to break the navigation solution down into basic building blocks for each type of available external information. The algorithm classifies external information as either line of position or gridded observations. For any line of position observation, the algorithm generates a multi-modal block of parallel position estimate hypotheses. The multimodal hypotheses are input into an arbiter which produces a single unimodal output. If a priori maps of gridded information are available, they are used within the arbiter structure to aid in the elimination of false hypotheses. / (cont.) For the proof of concept, this research uses ranges from a single external acoustic transponder in the hypothesis generation process and grids of low-resolution bathymetric data from a ship-based multibeam sonar in the arbitration process. The major contributions of this research include the in-situ identification of acoustic multipath time-of-flight measurements, the multiscale utilization of a priori low resolution bathymetric data in a high-resolution navigation algorithm, and the design of a navigation algorithm with a flexible architecture. This flexible architecture allows the incorporation of multimodal beliefs without requiring a complex mechanism for real-time hypothesis generation and culling, and it allows the real-time incorporation of multiple types of external information as they become available in situ into the overall navigation solution. / by Cara Elizabeth Grupe LaPointe. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M. in Oceanographic Engineering)--Joint Program in Applied Ocean Science and Engineering (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Ocean Engineering; and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution); and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-78). / The thesis presents data processing schemes for extracting Earth-referenced current velocity from relative current velocity measurement made by an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) borne by an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). Compared with conventional approaches, current profiling from an AUV platform has advantages including three-dimensional mobility, rapid response, high-level intelligent control, independence from ship motion and weather constraint, and shallow water operation. First, an acausal postprocessing scheme is presented for estimating the AUV's own velocity and removing it from the relative velocity measurement to obtain the true current velocity. Then, a causal scheme for estimating the Earth-referenced current velocity is presented. The causal algorithm is based on an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) that utilizes the hydrodynamics connecting current velocity to vehicle's motion. In both methods, the raw ADCP measurement is corrected to achieve more accurate current velocity estimate. Field data from the Haro Strait Tidal Front Experiment are processed by both methods. Current velocity estimation results reveal horizontal and vertical velocity structure of the tidal mixing process, and are also consistent with the vehicle's deviated trajectory. The capability of the AUV-borne current profiling system is thus demonstrated. / by Yanwu Zhang. / S.M.in Oceanographic Engineering

Thesis (S.M. in Oceanographic Engineering)--Joint Program in Applied Ocean Science and Engineering (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Ocean Engineering; and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-89). / by Qiang Wang. / S.M.in Oceanographic Engineering

Thesis (Ocean E.)--Joint program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Ocean Engineering and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 127-128). / Acoustic coded signaling offers potentially significant improvements over traditional "toneburst" methods in many underwater applications where error due to noise and multipath interference is a problem. In this thesis, the use of these spread spectrum techniques is analyzed for navigation of the REMUS autonomous underwater vehicle. The accuracy of the current system using Turyn and Barker sequences, as well as toneburst, is quantified, and the sources of the remaining error are examined. / by Benjamin Kerbin Evans. / Ocean E.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Joint Program in Applied Ocean Science and Engineering (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Ocean Engineering; and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), 2005. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-187). / This thesis describes a vision-based, large-area, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithm that respects the low-overlap imagery constraints typical of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) while exploiting the inertial sensor information that is routinely available on such platforms. We adopt a systems-level approach exploiting the complementary aspects of inertial sensing and visual perception from a calibrated pose-instrumented platform. This systems-level strategy yields a robust solution to underwater imaging that overcomes many of the unique challenges of a marine environment (e.g., unstructured terrain, low-overlap imagery, moving light source). Our large-area SLAM algorithm recursively incorporates relative-pose constraints using a view-based representation that exploits exact sparsity in the Gaussian canonical form. This sparsity allows for efficient O(n) update complexity in the number of images composing the view-based map by utilizing recent multilevel relaxation techniques. We show that our algorithmic formulation is inherently sparse unlike other feature-based canonical SLAM algorithms, which impose sparseness via pruning approximations. In particular, we investigate the sparsication methodology employed by sparse extended information filters (SEIFs) and offer new insight as to why, and how, its approximation can lead to inconsistencies in the estimated state errors. Lastly, we present a novel algorithm for efficiently extracting consistent marginal covariances useful for data association from the information matrix. / (cont.) In summary, this thesis advances the current state-of-the-art in underwater visual navigation by demonstrating end-to-end automatic processing of the largest visually navigated dataset to date using data collected from a survey of the RMS Titanic (path length over 3 km and 3100 m² of mapped area). This accomplishment embodies the summed contributions of this thesis to several current SLAM research issues including scalability, 6 degree of freedom motion, unstructured environments, and visual perception. / by Ryan M. Eustice. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Joint Program in Applied Ocean Science and Engineering (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering; and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), February 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 133-140). / Self-localization of an underwater vehicle is particularly challenging due to the absence of Global Positioning System (GPS) reception or features at known positions that could otherwise have been used for position computation. Thus Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) applications typically require the pre-deployment of a set of beacons.This thesis examines the scenario in which the members of a, group of AUVs exchange navigation information with one another so as to improve their individual position estimates. We describe how the underwater environment poses unique challenges to vehicle navigation not encountered in other environments in which robots operate and how cooperation can improve the performance of self-localization. As intra-vehicle communication is crucial to cooperation, we also address the constraints of the communication channel and the effect that these constraints have on the design of cooperation strategies. The classical approaches to underwater self-localization of a single vehicle, as well as more recently developed techniques are presented. We then examine how methods used for cooperating land-vehicles can be transferred to the underwater domain. An algorithm for distributed self-localization, which is designed to take the specific characteristics of the environment into account, is proposed. We also address how correlated position estimates of cooperating vehicles can lead to overconfidence in individual position estimates. Finally, key to any successful cooperative navigation strategy is the incorporation of the relative positioning between vehicles. The performance of localization algorithms with different geometries is analyzed and a distributed algorithm for the dynamic positioning of vehicles, which serve as dedicated navigation beacons for a fleet of AUVs, is proposed. / by Alexander Bahr. / Ph.D.

Ionic polymer metal composites (IPMC) are a new class of smart materials that have attractive characteristics such as muscle like softness, low voltage and power consumption, and good performance in aqueous environments. Therefore, there is a significant motivation for research on design and development of IPMC based biomimetic propulsion systems for underwater vehicles. In aerospace, underwater vehicles finds application for forensic studies of spaceship wrecks, missile fragments and any airplane accidents in sea and ocean terrains. Such vehicles can also survey moons and planets that house water oceans. Among biomimetic swimming systems, fish inspired swimming has gained interest since fish like swimming provides high maneuverability, high cruising speed, noiseless propulsion and efficient stabilization compared to conventional propulsion systems. In this work, the paired pectoral fin based oscillatory propulsion using IPMC for aquatic propulsor applications is studied. Dynamic characteristics of IPMC fin are analyzed using numerical simulations and optimization is used to improve the fin design. A complex hydrodynamic function is used to describe the behavior of an active IPMC fin actuator in water. The structural model of the IPMC fin is obtained by modifying the classical dynamic equation for a slender beam to account for the electromechanical dynamics of the IPMC beam in water. A quasi-steady blade element model that accounts for unsteady phenomena such as added mass effects, dynamic stall, and the cumulative Wagner effect is used to estimate the hydrodynamic performance of the flapping fin. It is shown that the use of optimization methods can lead to significant improvement in performance of the IPMC fin. Further, three fish species with high performance flapping pectoral fin locomotion are chosen and performance analysis of each fin design is conducted to discover the better configurations for engineering applications. Dynamic characteristics of IPMC actuated flapping fins having the same size as the actual fins of three different fish species, Gomphosus varius, Scarus frenatus and Sthethojulis trilineata, are also analyzed. Finally, a comparative study is performed to analyze the performance of the three different biomimetic IPMC flapping pectoral fins.

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / alities. The extensible Markup Language (XML) is used for data storage and message exchange, Extensible 3D (X3D) Graphics for visualization and XML Schema-based Binary Compression (XSBC) for data compression. The AUV Workbench provides an intuitive cross-platform-capable tool with extensibility to provide for future enhancements such as agent-based control, asynchronous reporting and communication, loss-free message compression and built-in support for mission data archiving. This thesis also investigates the Jabber instant messaging protocol, showing its suitability for text and file messaging in a tactical environment. Exemplars show that the XML backbone of this open-source technology can be leveraged to enable both human and agent messaging with improvements over current systems. Integrated Jabber instant messaging support makes the NPS AUV Workbench the first custom application supporting XML Tactical Chat (XTC). Results demonstrate that the AUV Workbench provides a capable testbed for diverse AUV technologies, assisting in the development of traditional single-vehicle operations and agent-based multiple-vehicle methodologies. The flexible design of the Workbench further encourages integration of new extensions to serve operational needs. Exemplars demonstrate how in-mission and post-mission event monitoring by human operators can be achieved via simple web page, standard clients or custom instant messaging client. Finally, the AUV Workbench's potential as a tool in the development of multiple-AUV tactics and doctrine is discussed. / Civilian, Singapore Defence Science and Technology Agency