Sponsor: Office of Naval Research
Project Leads: Warren Fox (UW-APL), Geoff Hollinger (OSU), Dana Manalang (UW-APL)
The Resident Seabed Autonomy (RSA) Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) docking project encompasses applied research and development to enable long-term submerged UUV operations without reliance upon an on-site support vessel. Project efforts include the development and integration of complete subsea docking functionality, including terminal homing, physical latching and unlatching, power and data transfer, and autonomously sensing a wide variety of environmental conditions. Underpinned by the implementation of a simulation environment to rapidly assess docking-related algorithms, the RSA team is working to fabricate a novel prototype docking system suitable for multiple sizes of UUV hulls, and seeks to test the prototype in progressively challenging environmental conditions. The RSA team is made up of APL-UW engineers and OSU CoRIS faculty and graduate students.