Abstract
System and mission requirements for the use of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) were defined. A requirement analysis was done having in mind the definition of search methodologies involving multiple cooperating vehicles. Control and navigation issues were addressed. Various search strategies were proposed and analyzed in terms of control, navigation and overall system requirements.

Abstract
This work presents a hybrid maneuver for gradient search with multiple AUV's. The mission consists in following a gradient field in order to locate the source of a hydrothermal vent or underwater freshwater source. The formation gradient search exploits the environment structuring by the phenomena to be studied. The ingredients for coordination are the payload data collected by each vehicle and their knowledge of the behaviour of other vehicles and detected formation distortions. Copyright © 2004 IFAC. Copyright © 2004 IFAC

Abstract
This paper presents a conceptual architecture for the control of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles based on the concept of Generalized Vehicle. The design of this architecture was driven by requirements extracted from the analysis of operational scenarios involving the operation of multiple vehicles and embodies an extension of the Dynamically Reconfigurable Control Architecture for an AUV proposed by the authors in previous published work.

Abstract

Abstract
This paper describes a preliminary and innovative approach to integrated cooperative control and navigation of multi robots dynamic formations that encompasses the simultaneous tracking of opponent team players in robotic football games. Unlike traditional approaches that use self-localization to distribute object position estimates, a coordinated approach to cooperative formation navigation is proposed. The control architecture is based in a hierarchic hybrid systems approach, where distributed maneuvers allow simultaneous navigation and coordination. Our main contributions reside in an integrated control and navigation design framework yielding cooperative localization maneuvers and also some specific maneuver results on both formation estimation and global localization of two robots and two landmarks with bearing only measurements. © 2006 IEEE.

Abstract
It is well-known that ROVs require human intervention to guarantee the success of their assignment, as well as the equipment safety. However, as its teleoperation is quite complex to perform, there is a need for assisted teleoperation. This study aims to take on this challenge by developing vision-based assisted teleoperation maneuvers, since a standard camera is present in any ROV. The proposed approach is a visual servoing solution, that allows the user to select between several standard image processing methods and is applied to a 3-DOF ROV. The most interesting characteristic of the presented system is the exclusive use of the camera data to improve the teleoperation of an underactuated ROV. It is demonstrated through the comparison and evaluation of standard implementations of different vision methods and the execution of simple maneuvers to acquire experimental results, that the teleoperation of a small ROV can be drastically improved without the need to install additional sensors.