Robots in the Deep

Posted 31 Jan 2003 at 05:20 UTC by steve

The new issue of Nature includes an article on the latest state-of-the-art Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). They can take on tasks too dangerous for crewed vessels and too difficult for ROVs, which must be remotely controlled from the surface. Much of the article is about ABE, a robot that has proven the usefulness of AUVs on several recent missions, including one in which it used sonar to produce a topographical map of the seabed with 30 times the resolution attainable from a surface vessel.

Any info on the compasses they use?, posted 31 Jan 2003 at 16:11 UTC by earlwb » (Master)

I read they use some sort of a gyroscope-compass to determine headings? Any info about this? Could be good for robots to determine headings. The current Dinsmore Compass works good, but it is very sensitive to nearby magnetic fields like buildings, motors, and vibration.

re: gyrocompass, posted 12 Feb 2003 at 21:04 UTC by jimbo » (Journeyer)

I've used various sensors like this, usually called Attitude Heading Reference sensors, which combine a three axis flux gate magnetometer, rate gyros and accelerometers. They do internal filtering and output angles and angle rates for yaw, pitch and roll. The mag can usually be calibrated for nearby metal that is part of the vehicle structure.

Two small, sub-$2k devices on the market that we are currently evaluating:
InertiaCube2
3DM-G

In our existing vehicles we use an $8k device from Crossbow Technologies.

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