XAUV: A Modular Highly Maneuverable Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

The XAUV is a new AUV developed for rapid algorithm and sensor development. It is also designed to complement existing shiphull inspection efforts by moving quickly around a ship, generating a coarse map. The overall philosophy is to create a vehicle modular enough to experiment with new sensors and configurations, small enough to operate in small tanks, and coded to minimize the overhead required to test new SLAM and control algorithms. Physically, the vehicle is a stacked hull design, with control and sensing components on top, and a swappable battery on the bottom. It has a 2DOF servoed sensor mount on the front, allowing the vehicle to scan a ship or wall to the side, while moving forward. The array carries a camera and blazed array, and can be refitted to carry a novel 3D camera and/or most other small sensors. The vehicle can also be fitted with up to eight control surfaces: four in front and four in back; this will allow nimble high seed maneuvering. It uses two vertical and two forward thruster for normal operation, but can also be fitted with servoed thrusters (one or two DOF each) for hovering and experimental applications. The control system runs a combination of MOOS, MATLAB, and VB applications, and can be booted on the one best suited for the developer, with the intention of making the interface between sensor inputs, high- level code, and thruster outputs, as invisible as possible. The vehicle has been fully designed and is under final manufacturing and initial testing and coding.