Date of Award
2025
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science in Ocean Engineering
Department
Ocean Engineering
First Advisor
Mingxi Zhou
Abstract
The growing demand for ocean mapping and survey missions has increased interest in reliable AUV-ASV platforms. In such systems, reliable communication between the AUV and ASV is critical for monitoring the AUV's status and offloading large data products such as multi-beam sonar point clouds. While the range of acoustic telemetry can span several kilometers, its bandwidth is inadequate for transmitting high-volume data streams (such as images and point clouds). Underwater optical communication modems, in contrast, provide a relatively high bandwidth but are hindered by rapid attenuation in turbid water and a narrow field of view. This thesis introduces an online, kinodynamic, non-holonomic waypoint planner that maximizes expected optical link quality between a leader AUV and a follower ASV. The planner employs a physics-based optical link model to score candidate waypoints and selects a trajectory that satisfies the ASV's dynamic constraints while maintaining and optimizing the optical link. Validation was performed in the high-fidelity Stonefish simulator using realistic hydrodynamic vehicle parameters. Across 27 distinct hyper-parameter configurations, comprising 140 independent trial runs, the planner achieved 100% link uptime after first contact and kept the ASV within 0.87m of the instantaneous optimal surface point for 78% of the mission and within 1.36m for 95% of the mission. The regression analysis revealed the isolated and synergistic performance effects of varying the algorithm's hyper-parameters. These results demonstrate that a physics-aware waypoint planner can sustain a robust, continuous optical communication channel in leader-follower operations, enabling high-bandwidth data transfer for ocean survey missions.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Austin, Ansel R., "OPTICAL-LINK-AWARE ONLINE WAYPOINT PLANNER FOR ASV-AUV SYSTEMS" (2025). Open Access Master's Theses. Paper 2682.
https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/theses/2682