Towards the Development of the Multipurpose Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have made great progress in recent years having use in a wide variety of applications. With this, there have been many new designs developed to meet these needs. However throughout their advancement, there remains a handful of features which greatly increase the versatility of these vehicles. In this paper we introduce the Multipurpose Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (MAUV), its intended applications, and its methods of actuation. The primary actuator is the Differential Tilting Thruster (DTT), where herein its design and characterization is described, this is then followed by how the DTT, the Variable Buoyancy System (VBS), and the moving mass work together to enable both horizontal cruising and vertical diving configurations.