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CLASS:PUBLIC
CREATED:20260422T234238Z
DESCRIPTION:Norman Chung \n\nMasters Student \n\nDepartment of Ocean & Resources Engineering \n\nUniversity of Hawai’i at Manoa \n\n\n\n\n\n**This defense will be held in person (Holmes 287) and Zoom**\n\nMeeting ID: 839 1898 9765\n\nPasscode: NormanMS\n\nZoom link: https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/83918989765\n\n\n\n\n\nNear-shore environments are important to oceanographers because of their relationship to the biogeochemical and anthropogenic processes which occur on land and at sea. Some traditional approaches to researching these environments include using undersea infrastructure, such as cabled observatories, and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Each of these approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages. Undersea infrastructure uses the proximity between near-shore environments and land to support oceanographic sensor arrays, but it is fixed and cannot adapt to investigate interesting, chance events. On the other hand, AUVs can react to these chance events, but require intermittent human intervention and maintenance to continue operating. A novel way to combine these two, complementary approaches is resident, autonomous underwater vehicles (RAUVs). RAUVs are AUVs which permanently reside at underwater locations and perform multiple missions at a given site of interest without needing physical human intervention. They can react to events of interest and capture information at the finer spatial and temporal scales not captured as well by undersea infrastructure while using said infrastructure to recharge and exchange data for new missions. One obstacle associated with RAUV operation is the need to connect an RAUV to its underwater docking station during charging. Wired connections are prone to malfunctions in an underwater environment. However, new, wireless, inductive charging systems show promise for RAUV systems because they are less susceptible to damage via seawater and they better allow RAUVs with enough control authority to properly mount themselves for charging without human help.\n\n\n\n\nThe goal of this research is to assess the feasibility of RAUV operation in the rough, near-shore environment at Kilo Nalu Observatory (KNO), a near-shore observatory off the south coast of Honolulu, Hawaii. To that end, we present the design of a low-cost RAUV meant to autonomously dock, charge, and exchange data using KNO’s undersea infrastructure. The basis of our vehicle is the BlueROV2 Heavy, an affordable, underwater robot sold by Blue Robotics. Here, we show the mechanical and electrical upgrades made to turn the BlueROV2 Heavy into an RAUV. The mechanical upgrades include a new frame, increased payload capacity, larger thrusters, and a new camera dome. The electrical upgrades include larger battery capacity, an inductive charging module, a gimbaled camera system, and increased computing power. We also present the work done to develop an internal temperature monitoring system that ensures our RAUV’s batteries do not overheat during charging. Through this project, we hope to advance oceanographic research in KNO’s near-shore environment and accelerate the development of wireless, inductive charging and docking systems in the hopes that other cabled observatories outside of Honolulu can one day use these systems to support their own RAUVs.
DTEND;TZID=Pacific/Honolulu:20250429T030000Z
DTSTAMP:20260422T234238Z
DTSTART;TZID=Pacific/Honolulu:20250429T010000Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260422T234238Z
LOCATION:Holmes 287 
PRIORITY:5
SEQUENCE:0
SUMMARY;LANGUAGE=en-us:Resident AUV design and validation for autonomous docking...
TRANSP:OPAQUE
UID:177693735844036web-support-l@lists.hawaii.edu
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