MONSUN II: A small and inexpensive AUV for underwater swarms

Abstract

This paper presents the design and hardware architecture of the small and inexpensive AUV MONSUN II for use in a swarm. Due to the high number of robots in a swarm, this approach can profit from the parallelization of tasks and its fault-tolerance based on redundancy. This allows the design of small and inexpensive AUVs for applications such as environmental monitoring. First experiments of a simple following behaviour were performed to show the suitability of the system design. Keywords-autonomous underwater vehicle, swarm Area: Mobile robots / underwater robotics 1