Autonomous Underwater Vehicles for Cooperative Surveys of Deep-Water Sites

Experimental results obtained with the Autonomous Underwater Vehicles developed in the “Thesaurus” project are reported. The Thesaurus AUVs, “Typhoon”, are low-cost torpedo-shaped 300 m depth-rated vehicles implementing a distributed communication and localization scheme based on acoustic modems, one of them with Ultra Short Base Line (USBL) capabilities. Communication and localization results obtained in the experimentation of the Thesaurus project and the CMRE (NATO Ctr. Maritime Res. Exp.) cruise CommsNet13 show that the modem-based acoustic localization has the capacity of correcting the navigation drift of low-cost inertial units even at the very low and time-varying communication rates encountered in experimental conditions.