Date of Award

1-1-2022

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Ocean Engineering

Department

Ocean Engineering

First Advisor

Mingxi Zhou

Abstract

Generic open-source software frameworks are significantly valuable for robotics research and development. The emergence of low-cost Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) is speeding up because of the increased availability of consumer-grade parts such as actuators, pressure housings, and single-board computers. With the intention of providing off-the-shelf AUV/ASV control, guidance, and operation solution to kick-start future marine vehicle projects, this thesis presents a new open-source framework called Robot Operating System Marine Vehicle Packages (ROS-MVP). MVP is tightly integrated with the ROS infrastructure and the state-of-the-art ROS packages and can be easily configured for different marine robots. The framework consists of two main components: a low-level vehicle controller, and a mission controller with a plugin-based behavior interface. MVP-Control works by running a control allocation with a quadratic programming solver. MVP mission controller orchestrates the behaviors using a finite state machine based process called MVP-Helm. MVP mission controller is packaged with common behaviors such as path following, depth tracking, periodic surfacing, etc. This thesis presents the details of the ROS-MVP framework design, integration, and field test results for an AUV in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License.

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