Intelligent docking for an autonomous ocean sampling network

Examines the complexities associated with docking for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) operating within an autonomous ocean sampling network. By looking at the different stages in a typical mission profile for a number of actual runs, the authors can qualitatively estimate failure rates for each of the different stages of docking. The authors examine statistics for the following stages - undocking and launching the vehicle; completing the mission; returning to the vicinity of the dock; turning on the homing beacon; homing into the dock; latching onto the dock; and finally aligning inductive cores for power transfer. Despite differing probabilities of success for the individual stages, the authors show that the redundancy associated with retrying each stage until the exit condition is met, is sufficient to yield a very high overall system reliability.