Assistant Professor, in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering Ryan Eustice talks about Michigan’s progress with underwater autonomous systems.

Inspection of ship hulls and offshore marine structures using autonomous underwater vehicles has emerged as a unique and challenging application of robotics. The problem poses rich questions in physical design and operation, perception and navigation, and planning, driven by difficulties arising from the acoustic environment, poor water quality and the highly complex structures to be inspected, among others.  On the open hull, robust integrated acoustic and visual mapping processes are needed to achieve closed-loop control relative to features such as weld-lines and biofouling.  In the complex area, implementation of new large-scale planning routines are required so as to achieve full imaging coverage of all the structures, at a resolution adequate to see small objects of interest to the user.  UM has, since 2007, collaborated with colleagues at MIT and with Bluefin Robotics on an Office of Naval Research sponsored project for autonomous hull inspection that has been recently demonstrated using the Bluefin Robotics Hovering Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (HAUV) platform.

Click here to view Prof. Eustice’s website.

For additional information on Prof. Ryan Eustice’s current research projects see the links below:

Real-time, Feature-based Navigation for Autonomous Hull Inspection

Great Lakes Fleet of AUV’s and ROV’s

Coastal AUV Fleet for Multi-Vehicle Mapping, Mapping and Control Research

Perception Driven Autonomy for Unmanned Surface and Underwater Vehicles:

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