Frank, Ehlers – författare

The recent development of advanced processing capabilities and higher yield power supplies means that Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUVs) are finding novel and increasingly advanced applications in research, military and commercial settings.This timely book provides a state-of-the-art overview of AUV design and practice. Focusing on the interplay between design and practice, it comprehensively covers control and navigation, communication and cooperation, and methodologies and applications where AUVs are used for education, research, biological and oceanographic studies, surveillance purposes, and military, security, and industrial tasks. The book covers key concepts for maritime engineers and navigation researchers and professionals, and is a useful reference for control and robotics researchers working on AUVs.

The maritime domain is of an enormous interest to our society, from the economy to health, and security. Operating in the maritime domain, on the other hand, is dangerous, expensive, and most of the time at low execution speed. Unmanned systems are in many ways suited to such environments, but the successful realisation of maritime autonomous vehicles requires an overarching design and development cycle, starting from design and modelling of unmanned systems, to control and implementation exhibiting a reliable and explainable level of autonomy and self-organization amidst the sudden and possibly extreme disturbances occurring in the uncertain and dynamic maritime environment.The aim of Maritime Autonomous Vehicles: Methods and measurements is to embed design and practice in the digitalisation process, which is currently revolutionising engineering approaches in many domains, governed by model-based engineering paradigms and digital twin concepts. The coverage of the book connects design processes, good practices and methods, specifying their interfaces and standards for real-world measurements.Written by a team of top-class international contributors, brought together by an expert in the field, this book provides an entry point into the hot topic of maritime autonomous vehicles - methods and measurements. The reader is invited to take a guided tour of the state-of-the-art in maritime robotics, and highlighted topics in coordination, communication, control, biomimetic design, and the real-world application of artificial intelligence tool chains for underwater datasets. The book presents a sophisticated simulation or surrogate model framework capable of addressing the necessity of maintaining holistically the interrelation of the many details real maritime environments need to have in order to be accurately described.This thoughtful and authoritative work is intended to be a valuable source of information for researchers and engineers from academia and industry, working in the fields of navigation, robotics, radar, and of course maritime autonomous vehicles.

This book provides a foundation of the overall cycle from design and modelling to implementation and control of unmanned systems, exhibiting autonomy and instantiating self-organization amidst disturbances, also functioning in uncertain and dynamic environments. The underlying assumption of the research path taken is that unmanned systems exhibiting attributes of autonomy, autonomous functionality, and resilience have to be considered as technically engineered systems. Hence, validation, verification, certification, and acceptance testing have to be provided together with the product "robot capable of fulfilling a specific requirement." The key is to provide a mathematically sound “metric” to evaluate autonomy, autonomous functionality, and resilience, directly applicable to real complex engineering systems. This overarching approach, presented as a lecture script, is reaching out to provide an ethically aligned view on engineering, specifically aiming to support human's free will.