A Hybrid AUV Design for Shallow Water Reef Navigation

TLDR

Coral reef environments are highly unstructured, making efficient navigation difficult for current robotic vehicles, which typically have limited autonomy and require tethers and significant external infrastructure. The paper develops a low‑cost AUV for underwater monitoring and surveying in highly unstructured reef environments, aiming to enable unaided navigation, cooperative robotics, sensor‑network distribution, and data harvesting, and presents experimental results demonstrating its performance. The hybrid AUV design by CSIRO balances endurance, manoeuvrability, and functionality to provide a low‑cost research platform for reef monitoring. Experimental results demonstrate the vehicle’s effective performance in reef environments, validating its navigation and data‑harvesting capabilities.

Abstract

The highly unstructured nature of coral reef environments makes them difficult for current robotic vehicles to efficiently navigate. Typical research and commercial platforms have limited autonomy within these environments and generally require tethers and significant external infrastructure. This paper outlines the development of a new robotic vehicle for underwater monitoring and surveying in highly unstructured environments and presents experimental results illustrating the vehicle's performance. The hybrid AUV design developed by the CSIRO robotic reef monitoring team realises a compromise between endurance, manoeuvrability and functionality. The vehicle represents a new era in AUV design specifically focused at providing a truly low-cost research capability that will progress environmental monitoring through unaided navigation, cooperative robotics, sensor network distribution and data harvesting.