AUV Docking and Recovery with USV: An Experimental Study

This paper presents an early stage work on docking and recovery of Autonomous Surface Vehicles (AUVs) with Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs). The docking system is collapsible and adaptable to a wide range of AUVs. Control of the docking maneuver is completed based on a one camera, one light approach using a frontseat-backseat control setup. In this scenario, the vehicle navigates under frontseat control to within visual range of the dock. The backseat controller then takes over and performs terminal homing. Pool and open water testing was completed with docking to a small dinghy in both a manned and unmanned configuration. Two experimental docking attempts are presented, one docking to a slow moving target and another docking to a quickly moving target. The empirical results show that docking and recovery of an AUV from a USV while underway is feasible.