Low-Cost Unmanned Underwater Vehicles for Multi-vehicle Autonomy Testing

摘要

Recent years have seen an increase of autonomy algorithms designed to enable multi-robot collaboration to accomplish tasks over different domains and time scales. While autonomous collaboration is highly desirable in the underwater domain where communication is limited, the validation and deployment of multi-vehicle autonomy is hindered by the high cost of underwater testing platforms and the significant number of vehicles required to demonstrate swarm capabilities. Currently available low-cost platforms tend to be specialized for specific tasks and lack the flexibility that is needed to evaluate multivehicle autonomy. Even the smallest underwater vehicles, which are on the lower end of the cost spectrum, can cost over ${\$}$ 10,000 each, making the purchase of multiple vehicles prohibitively expensive. This paper describes the design of a low-cost micro unmanned underwater vehicle $(\mu UV)$, named the BlueJacket, for use as a development and testing platform of multi-vehicle autonomy algorithms in the underwater domain which cost less than ${\$}$ 2,000. Initial results from field testing of the BlueJacket design are also presented and discussed.