Oceanography The Official Magazine of
The Oceanography Society
Volume 30 Issue 02

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Volume 30, No. 2
Pages 169 - 171

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Do AUVs Dream of Electric Eels?

By Jeffrey W. Kaeli  
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First Paragraph

Free-swimming autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are distinct from tethered remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and human-occupied vehicles in the amount of data-driven feedback a human can provide during a mission. While free-space optical communications afford tether-equivalent data rates at relatively close ranges (Farr et al., 2010), most AUVs employ acoustic modems to maintain two-way communications with their operators while underway (Freitag et al., 2005). However, the low bandwidths and high latencies inherent in underwater acoustics prohibit the real-time transmission of data generated by imaging sensors such as cameras and side-scan sonars. This has profound implications with regard to the meaning of the data an AUV collects and the trust an operator has in the AUV’s autonomy to react to data in the absence of direct human oversight.

Citation

Kaeli, J.W. 2017. Do AUVs dream of electric eels? Oceanography 30(2):169–171, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2017.239.

References

Farr, N., A. Bowen, J. Ware, C. Pontbriand, and M. Tivey. 2010. An integrated, underwater optical/acoustic communications system. In Proceedings of OCEANS 2010 MTS/IEEE. Seattle, September 20–23, 2010.

Freitag, L., M. Grund, S. Singh, J. Partan, P. Koski, and K. Ball. 2005. The WHOI micro-modem: An acoustic communications and navigation system for multiple platforms. In Proceedings of OCEANS 2005 MTS/IEEE. Washington, DC, September 17–23, 2005.

Girdhar, Y., and G. Dudek. 2010. ONSUM: A system for generating online navigation summaries. In Proceeding of the 2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Taipei, Taiwan, October 18–22, 2010, https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS.2010.5650315.

Kaeli, J.W., and H. Singh. 2015. Online data summaries for semantic mapping and anomaly detection with autonomous underwater vehicles. In Proceedings of MTS/IEEE OCEANS 2015. Genoa, Italy, May 18–21, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1109/OCEANS-Genova.2015.7271577.

Kaeli, J.W. 2016. Real-time anomaly detection in side-scan sonar imagery for adaptive AUV missions. Pp. 85–89 in Proceedings of 2016 IEEE-OES Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV). Tokyo, Japan, November 6–9, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1109/AUV.2016.7778653.

Mindell, D.A. 2015. Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy. Viking, 260 pp.

Murphy, C., and H. Singh. 2010. Wavelet compression with set partitioning for low bandwidth telemetry from AUVs. In Proceedings of the Fifth ACM International Workshop on Underwater Networks. Woods Hole, Massachusetts, September 30–October 1, 2010, http://wuwnet.acm.org/2010/papers/004.pdf.

Copyright & Usage

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