Tutorial: LAUV Lupis – deployment, mission planning and analysis
Lightweight Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (LAUV) Lupis is produced by OceanScan – Marine Systems and Technology, Lda, originally developed by the Laboratório de Sistemas e Tecnologia Subaquática (LSTS) from the Porto University The complete LAUV system includes all the equipment required to communicate with the vehicle, the command and control software, external aids for navigation, and a set of optional devices to facilitate various operations. LAUV Lupis is a lightweight, modular platform prepared to integrate a set of different sensors and sonars. The vehicle is targeted at cost-effective oceanographic, environmental and inspection surveys to fulfill a wide range of applications. On the software side, LSTS developed IMC, which defines a common control message used by all vehicles and computers in a networked environment. DUNE is a unified navigation environment, i.e. an embedded software with modules for control, navigation, simulation, networking, sensing and actuation. Neptus is the command and control framework, used to interface and control the LAUV vehicle. It includes two distinct tools: The Operator Console that supports the planning and the execution; and the Mission Review and Analysis which is the interface used to visualize and analyze data recorded by the LAUV vehicle.
This tutorial will describe and demonstrate how LAUV Lupis is deployed, controlled, tracked by a USBL system, and how its side-scan sonar (SSS) and camera-based survey/inspection missions are planned and executed taking into account various operational safety measures. Moreover, the collected side-scan and camera imagery will be analysed with prospects of anomaly detection in SSS imagery as well as photogrametric methods applied to the gathered visual data.