This paper presents an experimental study on new paradigms of haptic-based teleoperated navigation of underwater vehicles. Specifically, the work is focused on investigating the possibility of enhancing the user interaction by introducing haptic cues at the level of the user wrist providing a force feedback that reflects dynamic forces on the remotely operated underwater vehicle. Different typologies of haptic controllers are conceived and integrated with a real-time simulated model of an underwater robotic vehicle. An experimental test is designed to evaluate the usability of the system and to provide information on the global performance during the execution of simple tasks. Experiments are conducted with 7 candidates testing 12 different controllers. Among these, the most effective strategies have been identified and selected on the basis of minimization of errors on the vehicle trajectory and of the quality of the user’s interaction in terms of perceived comfort during operation. Overall, the results obtained with this study underline that haptic navigation control can have a positive influence on the performance of remotely controlled underwater vehicles.

For underwater vehicle navigation sensors, the output signal periods are different and time-varying. This would result in the decline of precision, and even wrong results. To deal with the problem, this paper puts forward a multi-sensor, adjustable-period integrated navigation method based on multi-stage signal trigger. This method considers the valid signals of a Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) as the trigger signals of a Dead-Reckoning (DR) navigation program. It also considers the valid signals of an acoustic positioning sensor as the trigger signals of the integrated navigation program. In this method, it can adjust the filtering period in real time. According to the time label of signals, this method actualises the time-space alignment of sensors. Then it conducts DR navigation and integrated navigation. The method can not only utilise the valid signals of each sensor sufficiently but also fuses the data based on time-space alignment efficiently. Sea trial data shows that when the output signal periods are certain, navigation precision of the method in this paper is better than a non-adjustable-period filtering method. Moreover, in poor conditions, it can also attain a high precision.

In this paper, two adaptive proportional-derivative (PD) control laws are proposed for autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The proposed adaptive controllers require only model of gravity and buoyancy regressor matrix and do not need any knowledge of inertia matrix, Coriolis and centripetal force, hydrodynamic damping, and the parameters of the gravity and buoyancy force. Hence, the proposed controllers have the advantages of simplicity and ease of implementation. We shall also prove that the setpoint controller is a special case of the region reaching controller when a desired region is reduced to a point. Furthermore, the inverse Jacobian matrix is not required in the control laws. Lyapunov-like functions are proposed for the stability analysis. Simulations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.