METHODS OF RELIABILITY-CONTROL FOR AUTONOMOUS UNDERWATER VEHICLES

Many autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have been recently developed and successfully deployed for various oceanographic, industry and defense applications. Two key concerns of AUVS are that they are expensive to produce and that they are mostly one-off products thereby disallowing quality control techniques and analysis used in mass production. This proposal aims to analyse techniques and to build a system aimed at reducing the chance of AUVs malfunctioningor becoming irrecoverably lost; hence, indirectly, the proposal aims to reduce the effective operational cost of AUVs. The project is to build on the many years of experience of designing, building and operating AUVs at the National Oceanography Centre at Southampton University. The main parts of the proposed system are and fault assessment system (IFAS), design optimization tool for overall operational reliability (DOPTOR) and human interface for daily operation (HIDO) .The cost of development and then loss of AUVs is very high relative to the design system proposed. The methodology developped in the project would pay for itself in a single vehicle and many times over should it be replicated. Collateral benefits of the proposal are that the methodology generated will largely be transferable to users other than the collaborators and also to other types of costly autonomous vehicles on land and in air.