抄録
AUV Tri-TON is a hovering type autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) developed in 2011 under the governmental project to develop instruments to estimate ore reserves in underwater hydrothermal deposits. The vehicle can dive as deep as 800m. The vehicle has two suites of imaging instruments looking forward and downward directions, in order to obtain dense, large-area 3D image of hydrothermal vent fields. Although the vehicle is not equipped with an inertial navigation system (INS), the vehicle can estimate its position in real-time with a precision enough for rough photo-mosaicing, owing to the mutual acoustic positioning with a seafloor station. This paper explains the concept of the vehicle and reports experimental results at Kagoshima bay in Japan.
