Energy-Efficient Configuration and Control Allocation for a Dynamically Reconfigurable Underwater Robot.

A dynamically reconfigurable underwater robot, which can vary its configuration during a mission, would be useful for confined environment exploration and docking because of its versatility. A mission can be performed by choosing among different configurations, and the energy cost may increase, owing to the reconfigurability of the robot. Energy saving is the critical issue in long-range missions with underwater robots.

A Dynamically Reconfigurable Autonomous Underwater Robot for Karst Exploration: Design and Experiment.

This paper presents the design and experiment of an autonomous underwater robot which can change the geometric configuration of its actuators, according to mission requirements or environmental constraints. The robot consists of two subsystems: forward part with three thrusters and backward part with four thrusters. The position and orientation of these thrusters can be dynamically changed during missions.

Over-Actuated Underwater Robots: Configuration Matrix Design and Perspectives.

In general, for the configuration designs of underwater robots, the positions and directions of actuators (i.e., thrusters) are given and installed in conventional ways (known points, vertically, horizontally).

Elevation Angle Estimations of Wide-Beam Acoustic Sonar Measurements for Autonomous Underwater Karst Exploration.

This paper proposes a solution for merging the measurements from two perpendicular profiling sonars with different beam-widths, in the context of underwater karst (cave) exploration and mapping. This work is a key step towards the development of a full 6D pose SLAM framework adapted to karst aquifer, where potential water turbidity disqualifies vision-based methods, hence relying on acoustic sonar measurements. Those environments have complex geometries which require 3D sensing.