We have developed an underwater vehicle that offers significant performance improvements over existing subsea elevators. Our Vertical Glider Robot falls under its own weight to a precise location on the seafloor, employing streamlining, active steering, and basic navigation instrumentation. We examine typical at-sea mission requirements, mention several key governing parameters, and outline our design approach. We then describe a prototype device, and present results from model-scale experiments.

/pdf/vertical-glider-robots-for-subsea-equipment-delivery-3spf3ognen.pdf

Vertical glider robots for subsea equipment delivery

Hadal science has become one of the research frontiers in earth sciences in recent years. Free-fall vehicle, also known as “lander” has provided new opportunities to investigate the hadal zone. Two hadal expeditions in the Mariana Trench were conducted successively with the support of Chinese Academy of Sciences since last June to this March. Two 7000-meter rating landers named Tian Ya and Hai Jiao were applied in the first expedition. Tian Ya was technologically promoted to adapt the static pressure of 11000-meter depth within 5 months, while another hadal lander named Wan Quan was built simultaneously, and were applied in the second expedition. Totally 29 deployments were accomplished, and arrived at the bottom of the Challenge Deep for 11 times. Results showed the proposed landers and related deep-sea technology in superior performance. Significant achievements were obtained in the two expeditions. It is believed that 10911m is the maximum depth of the Mariana Trench due to in-situ measurement by pressure sensor. The liparid was observed in 8152m, which was the deepest habitat ever found. Scientific data and samples obtained in the two expeditions are now under research by scientists, and it would help to understand the hadal zone better.

Scientific investigation application of hadal landers in the Mariana Trench

This paper presents progress on the design of a "smart elevator" to be used in conjunction with deep sea ROV operations. Deep sea elevators are gravity driven untethered platforms used to deliver and or return items from the sea floor. Elevators are used when items are too large or heavy to be handled by the ROV, or when the turn around time to recover and redeploy the ROV system for sample removal is prohibitive. Unfortunately, efficiency is complicated by the precision with which elevators can be landed at a specific location on the bottom and recovered on the surface because of currents and the inadequately known hydrodynamic effects. To improve the effectiveness of elevators we have investigated the gliding behavior of an elevator outfitted with wing foils in a variety of configurations. The foils are able to produce forward motion and turning that could be used to drive the elevator against a current or to a specific position on the seafloor. The results presented here for 1/10th and 1/2 scale models show achievable glide slopes of foward to downward velocity approaching .5 for situations representative of typical operating conditions.

Preliminary model tests for the design of a gliding deep water elevator

: This thesis discusses sensor management methods for multiple-vehicle fleets of autonomous underwater vehicles, which will allow for more efficient and capable infrastructure in marine science, industry, and naval applications. Navigation for fleets of vehicles in the ocean presents a large challenge, as GPS is not available underwater and dead-reckoning based on inertial or bottom-lock methods can require expensive sensors and suffers from drift. Due to zero drift, acoustic navigation methods are attractive as replacements or supplements to dead-reckoning, and centralized systems such as an Ultra-Short Baseline Sonar (USBL) allow for small and economical components onboard the individual vehicles. Motivated by subsea equipment delivery we present model-scale proof-of-concept experimental pool tests of a prototype Vertical Glider Robot (VGR), a vehicle designed for such a system. Due to fundamental physical limitations of the underwater acoustic channel, a sensor such as the USBL is limited in its ability to track multiple targets at best a small subset of the entire fleet may be observed at once, at a low update rate. Navigation updates are thus a limited resource and must be efficiently allocated amongst the fleet in a manner that balances the exploration versus exploitation tradeoff. The multiple vehicle tracking problem is formulated in the Restless Multi-Armed Bandit structure following the approach of Whittle in [108], and we investigate in detail the Restless Bandit Kalman Filters priority index algorithm given by Le Ny et al. in [71]. We compare round-robin and greedy heuristic approaches with the Restless Bandit approach in computational experiments. For the subsea equipment delivery example of homogeneous vehicles with depth-varying parameters, a suboptimal quasi-static approximation of the index algorithm balances low landing error with safety and robustness.

Multiple-vehicle resource-constrained navigation in the deep ocean

Sample recovery devices have been fabricated for use with the Jason deep diving remotely operated vehicle (ROV). They are custom-built, autonomous vertical transporters (AVTs) that are capable of raising numerous benthic samples and other payloads to the ocean's surface independent of the sampling ROV. AVTs are more commonly referred to as sample "elevators". Elevators are inexpensive to construct and can be deployed and recovered many times during the course of a single ROV dive in order to reduce wear and tear on the more expensive ROV. This paper describes the design, fabrication, operation and navigational tracking of these 6,000 meter rated, nondestructive benthic sample transportation vehicles.

/pdf/elevators-autonomous-transporters-for-deepsea-benthic-sample-21m4ornmqw.pdf

Elevators-autonomous transporters for deepsea benthic sample recovery

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Elevators-autonomous transporters for deepsea benthic sample recovery