Simulation based design and development of autonomous underwater vehicle IMGAM

IMGAM (Intelligentes Monitoring von Gasaustritten im Meer, English: Intelligent monitoring of gas emanations in the ocean) is a project supported by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology to build an autonomous system for gas flare detection, localisation and sampling in deep sea environment. In addition to today’s standards for AUV operation, IMGAM employs so called sensor reactive behaviour to react to the unpredictable nature of underwater gas flares. Such behaviour has an inherent risk of »wrong« decisions, which could culminate in the loss of the vehicle. Care must therefore be taken to ensure a thorough understanding of how the vehicle reacts to external stimuli and to its own actions. For highly complex systems, such understanding can best be achieved by extensively measuring or estimating the performance of all known subsystems and by combining these into a simulation model, which can then be used for development and testing of control- and autonomy algorithms. Extensive tests made it possible to identify risks and necessary system improvements long before the first metal was cut.

AUV | gas sampling | sensor reactive autonomy | system identification SYSID | hybrid AUV/ROV