The center began in 1987 with the joining of interested faculty from the Departments of Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering. Instrumental in its formation was the Navy's interest in such vehicles for clandestine mine countermeasures work. While that is still of great interest to the Navy, other applications to Ocean Science and commercial usage for monitoring and surveillance, have grown. The Center is focused on the development of advanced control methodologies for using this type of vehicle in very shallow waters where persistent wave and current action from the seaway make operations difficult.
The Center has been funded for several projects by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and with collaborative joint work with the Florida Atlantic University and more recently, Virginia Tech. Other related work using multiple small robotic land vehicles for minefield clearance and related missions clearing unexploded ordnance (UXO) has been funded by the Naval EOD Technical Division (Indian Head).
The Center has designed and built 3 underwater vehicles, NPS AUV I, the Phoenix AUV and the ARIES-a multi vehicle network server. The ARIES AUV is in the class of 2 meter vehicles weighing approximately 500 pounds (wet) but operated slightly light from neutrally buoyant. While the Phoenix had been used in the past for many studies relating to the design of control system architectures, including both the control of mission operation, and the vehicle motion, the ARIES is fully operational performing runs in Monterey Bay on a regular basis. It has been the experimental test-bed for development and evaluation of non-linear and adaptive control of vehicle motion. It has supported experimental work in system identification, navigational accuracy experiments with low cost sensors, acoustic modem control experiments, and more recently is equipped with a new blazed array forward looking sonar for experimentation in object detection and avoidance control. The development of high-speed graphics based physical modeling has been an aid to mission planning. A virtual world has been developed as an aid to visualization of vehicle behavior as well as for real time hardware in the loop, control code testing and evaluation.
The Center now has a REMUS AUV as well as the ARIES vehicle. The REMUS work supports technology development for bottom mapping, feature detection, feature-based navigation, and mine neutralization technologies. Additionally in 2005, the Center purchased two Scan Eagle Autonomous Aerial Vehicles with a gimble stabilized camera for the support of experiments with multiple vehicle cooperation, video cueing and aerial based communications relays in networked vehicle operations. In 2006, we acquired a Sea Fox autonomous surface vehicle from Northwind Marine, Inc and have developed its capabilities to include Radio Networked control and coordinated autonomous operations.
