Virtual-environment-based navigation and control of underwater vehicles

A remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) the Phantom S2, is being converted to an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) for shallow-water and coastal environments. After an overview of issues associated with designing and implementing an automated monitoring system, we provide justification and motivation for our research and define ecosystems and ecosystem management. We then discusses how the ROV to AUV conversion is being done by using mostly commercially available of-the-shelf hardware and software technologies. We then present the fundamentals of the three-layer fuzzy-logic navigation scheme for the underwater vehicle, as well as details pertaining to the virtual-reality-based environment modeling approach.