Compact, lightweight Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) with robust navigation and range for riverine reconnaissance

The objective of this Phase I SBIR project is to develop an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) with integrated sensing system for efficient and accurate spatial sampling for robust navigation, bathymetric SLAM, and current surveys in riverine environments. The proposed AUV system utilizes innovative propulsion, power harvesting, power management, hull design, and energy-efficient planning and control concepts to achieve a compact vehicle with extended upstream range. The system integrates a suite of intelligent mapping, localization, and navigation algorithms to reliably operate in incompletely known riverine environments with intermittent GPS availability. The proposed project addresses the development of a system-level architecture, designs of the physical AUV devices and accompanying algorithms, trade-off analyses, and analytical and simulation-based validation studies to estimate performance capabilities of the proposed system. This will provide a solid foundation for the Phase II effort, which will address the complete hardware and software implementation of the proposed integrated system and extensive experimental validation of the system capabilities. The system design addresses the desirable characteristics of low-cost and compact design, high endurance, extensibility for various mission scenarios, effective control actuators and control algorithms, and effective autonomous mapping capabilities in GPS-intermittent and GPS-denied environments.