Design and Implementation of a Peer-to-Peer Communication, Modular and Decentral YellowCube UUV

The underwater Unmanned Vehicles(UUVs) are pivot tools for offshore engineering and oceanographic research. Most existing UUVs do not facilitate easy integration of new or upgraded sensors. A solution to this problem is to have a modular UUV system with changeable payload sections capable of carrying different sensor to suite different missions. The design and implementation of a modular and decentral UUV named YellowCube is presented in the paper. Instead a centralised software architecture which is adopted by the other modular underwater vehicles designs, a Peer-To-Peer(P2P) communication mechanism is implemented among the UUV's modules. The experiments in the laboratory and sea trials have been executed to verify the performances of the UUV.

UGSim: Autonomous Buoyancy-Driven Underwater Glider Simulator with LQR Control Strategy and Recursive Guidance System

This paper presents the UGSim, a simulator for buoyancy-driven gliders, with a LQR control strategy, and a recursive guidance system. Building on the top of the DAVE and the UUVsim, it is designed to address unique challenges that come from the complex hydrodynamic and hydrostatic impacts on buoyancy-driven gliders, which conventional robotics simulators can't deal with. Since distinguishing features of the class of vehicles, general controllers and guidance systems developed for underwater robotics are infeasible. The simulator is provided to accelerate the development and the evaluation of algorithms that would otherwise require expensive and time-consuming operations at sea. It consists of a basic kinetic module, a LQR control module and a recursive guidance module, which allows the user to concentrate on the single problem rather than the whole robotics system and the software infrastructure. We demonstrate the usage of the simulator through an example, loading the configuration of the buoyancy-driven glider named Petrel-II, presenting its dynamics simulation, performances of the control strategy and the guidance system.