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Talk-04: SeaBeaver AUV: What’s New and What’s Next
Supun Randeni, Michael Sacarny, and Michael Benjamin
MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, Cambridge MA, USA
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have conventionally cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, making them high-value assets within universities and commercial organizations. Consequently, their use has generally been restricted to highly trained personnel, such as postdoctoral researchers, technical staff and above. This has limited innovation, as the high consequences associated with vehicle loss discourage experimentation. These constraints have also created significant barriers to entry for emerging research areas such as distributed underwater sensing, underwater networking, and swarming, as well as for educational initiatives such as STEM-focused underwater robotics, which have the potential to transform the field.
Building on our experience developing approximately six classes of AUVs over the past eight years, as well as more than two decades of providing open-source software for commercial AUVs, we developed the SeaBeaver AUV class as a universal testbed for research, educational, and commercial applications. In this talk, we present the current design of the SeaBeaver III AUV and highlight a range of research, educational, and commercial applications in which the platform has been employed to date. We also highlight future directions of this program.
Website: https://seabeaver.mit.edu
Categories:
- AUVs
- HydroMAN
- MITFrontSeat
- VECTORS
- Sea Beaver