Autonomous underwater vehicles: Instrumentation and measurements

Oceans exploration and inspection are a great challenge for the industry nowadays. The underwater instrumentation and measurements are improving due to the current technologies, or by development of new ones, to cover the demand of the new industry offshore. The Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), a subcategory of submarine, is used to perform subaquatic tasks. This vehicle provides advantages for underwater works, e.g., safety and reliability inspections, but it also offers limitations for sensors systems, monitoring and communications systems, autonomous operational endurances, propulsion systems or mapping designs, etc. The main scientific contributions of this paper are: a review of the state of art in novel and main instrumentation and measurement systems embedded in AUVs; an illustration of their future uses and development; and a synthesis of the main and current navigation, mapping and sampling technologies, together with different applications.