Development and Control of an Autonomous Reconfigurable Underwater Vehicle

Since the development of the first Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), the demanded tasks for subsea operations have become more and more challenging as, for instance, intervention, maintenance and repair of seabed installations, in addition to surveys. As a result, the development of Autonomous Underwater Reconfigurable Vehicles (AURVs) with the capability of interacting with the surrounding environment and autonomously changing their configuration, according to the task at hand, can represent a real breakthrough in underwater system technologies. Driven by these considerations, an innovative AURV has been developed by the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Florence (DIEF), Italy, capable of efficiently reconfiguring its shape according to the task at hand. In particular, the RUVIFIST (Reconfigurable Underwater Vehicle for Inspection, Free-floating Intervention and Survey Tasks) vehicle has been provided with two extreme configurations: a slender (“survey”) configuration for long navigation tasks, and a stocky (“hovering”) configuration designed for challenging goals as intervention operations. In particular, an accurate description of the overall vehicle is currently provided in this work, along with several preliminary tests.