Imotus: An autonomous underwater resident vehicle

for vertical profiling

Jacqueline Nichols, Dana Leslie, Serdar Soylu, Scott McLean

Tristan Crees, Adrian Woodroffe Ocean Networks Canada Innovation Centre
Cellula Robotics Ltd. Victoria, Canada
Burnaby, Canada sdmclean@uvic.ca
info@cellula.com

Abstract—A resident Hovering Autonomous Underwater Vehicle
(HAUV) platform, Imotus-V, is introduced for a novel approach to
vertical profiling from seabed to surface. The system includes a
vehicle and a subsea docking interface, which communicates directly
to the shore. The HAUV provides complete six degrees of freedom
motion capability while profiling the water column, and includes a
large, customizable payload bay. The subsea docking interface
includes a blue light modem and pinless inductive charger for
transferring data and charging batteries in between missions. This
docking infrastructure enables long-term, resident functionality for
the system. Software architecture and navigation controls are
presented. Upcoming missions for the test bed are detailed, including
both confined space and open-water missions.
Ocean Networks Canada operates two vertical profiler
systems on its two main electro-optic cable systems, VENUS
and NEPTUNE. The first vertical profiler was installed in 2009
on the NEPTUNE Observatory Barkley Canyon node located
off the west coast of Vancouver Island at the Upper Slope site
in 400m of water [7]. Developed by NGK Ocean in Japan the
system has a significant payload of 10 instruments in the
profiling float body, shown in Fig. 1. While the system has
proven to be a valuable research tool, issues with degradation
of the float tether have limited its availability with the system
being fully operational for about 9 months since 2009.

Keywords—Autonomous underwater vehicle; HAUV; vertical

profiler; resident vehicle; RAUV

I. INTRODUCTION
Underwater winch systems can provide sustained, real-time
high-resolution data from the water column to study high
frequency and/or episodic biogeochemical events that are not
readily available from other traditional techniques (research
vessels, moored buoys or benthic cabled seafloor systems).
Having a winch system on the seafloor is an appealing concept
as the system has no surface expression, is not impacted by
surface weather conditions, and can provide persistent
sampling anywhere throughout the water column. Powered
winch systems can carry a large scientific payload while
suppling the necessary power and bandwidth for high Fig. 1. NGK Ocean vertical profiler system being deployed for testing
frequency sampling. Underwater winch systems do, however,
require significant effort to deploy and maintain and they are The second system was installed in 2012 on the VENUS
usually limited to deployments in pre-determined fixed Observatory at an inshore location at 200m depth in Saanich
locations. Inlet on Vancouver Island [8]. This system was developed by
MacArtney Underwater Technology and is shown in Fig. 2. To
Early prototypes of vertical profiling underwater winch
improve operational performance, the underwater winch was
systems go back at least as far as the Cyclesonde in the early
installed at the surface on a large 5m buoy, lowering the
1970’s [1], and over a dozen designs for these systems exist.
instrument package. It too has collected valuable water column
Novel approaches include designs like the Seahorse wave
data, but has had problems preventing it from being fully
powered crawler [2]) or the SeaCycler [3].
operational. Underwater winch systems continue to be
Motorized systems on the seafloor usually require deployed on new cabled ocean observatories. The US Ocean
significant power and only became available with cabled ocean Observing Initiative has recently deployed a series of 200m
observing systems like LEO-15 (winch developed by Woods winch profiler systems on the Regional Cabled Array.
Hole Oceanographic Institute – [4], [5]) and the Bonne Bay
Observatory (winch developed by InterOcean – [6]) that utilize
high power and high bandwidth electro-optic cables.

978-1-5386-4814-8/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE

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 with a relatively low-cost fiberglass skin. The initial green skin
of the Imotus-1 test bed is shown in Fig. 3, and a rendering of
the skin for the vertical profiling application is detailed in Fig.
4. The design also enables the most cost-effective sensors to be
used for a given application. For example, if high navigation
accuracy is required, a fiber optic gyro is installed. For other
applications, a lower cost magnetic compass is used in place of
the fiber optic gyro.

Fig. 2. MacArtney Underwater Technology winch system mount on a 5m

buoy on the ONC VENUS array

Ocean Networks Canada is interested in exploring

alternative approaches to persistent vertical profiling and has
been working with Defence Research and Development
Canada (DRDC) to test and evaluate new Autonomous
Underwater Vehicle (AUV) designs to replace winch-based
profiler systems. Initial evaluation and testing has been with
the Cellula Robotics’ Imotus vehicle. Fig. 4. Imotus-V rendering in subsea dock

II. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION B. Vehicle

A. Overview The Imotus-V is based on the successful Imotus-1
development testbed. The core system was designed to operate
Imotus was built using commercial subsea components in a
within complex enclosed spaces in a range of fluids with
customised configuration. When combined with Cellula’s
nominal depth rating of 150m and endurance of 12hrs. The
navigation software, in particular Simultaneous Localization
central frame supports the electronic canisters, battery pods,
and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms using profiling sonars, a
cameras, and eight vectored electric thrusters. The thruster
unique capability has been developed for operation in confined
layout provides full six degree of freedom (DoF) manoeuvring
areas. This capability was demonstrated with a series of pool
with redundancy. The vehicle’s important characteristics are
trials in Q4 2017.
summarized in Table 1.
Cellula’s focus for the development of the Imotus platform
has been to customize the vehicle to solve specific challenges TABLE I. CHARACTERISTICS OF IMOTUS-V
rather than supplying a generic ‘pickup truck’ type vehicle that Category Characteristics
is left for the client to configure. The core vehicle is built on a ADCP, CTD
Robot Operating System (ROS) platform, operating over a Payload Bay Surface piercing mast
modular Ethernet architecture. Additional sensors available on dock or vehicle
DVL, USBL, magnetic compass or fiber optic gyro,
Navigation
GPS (on mast)
Depth 500m standard, 3000m optional
Range Daily 10km mission range at 1.5kts
Acoustic within 1km
Telemetry
High-speed blue light when docking (within 5m)
(via dock)
100Mbits when docked
6-DoF control through 8 vectored thrusters
Control Operator setpoint input
Autonomous return home via safe path
1.1m diameter, 0.9m height (dependent on skin
Size
configuration)
Weight ~92kg

The base vehicle was designed to operate with or without a

Fig. 3. Imotus-1 HAUV core vehicle, with and without skin fiber-optic umbilical. The fiber optic umbilical allows real-
time, high bandwidth monitoring of vehicle health and sensors,
For each specific application, the core vehicle, shown in the
including inspection cameras. Should this line snag on
first image of Fig. 3, can be easily customised with a range of
anything as it travels, it can be automatically severed by the
navigation and payload sensors to optimize the vehicle’s
vehicle and allow the Imotus to carry on the mission
performance. Even the shape of the vehicle can be changed

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 autonomously or abort and follow a safe route back to the
extraction point.
The control system includes a PC/104 stack for the CPU
and distributed I/O modules, providing low weight, size, and
power consumption. These I/O modules communicate with the
main computer over ethernet, and interface directly with the
thrusters and internal sensors. The Imotus-V vehicle will
include an integrated 4kWh battery and battery monitoring
system.
The motion control of the vehicle is provided by eight
thrusters, four of them horizontally mounted for the lateral
motion and the other four vertically mounted for the vertical
motion. The redundant thruster layout allows motion control
even in the presence of thruster faults (up to two thrusters).
C. Software
The Imotus control software consists of a suite of Software
Configuration Items (SCIs). The two major SCI’s are Control
GUI (topside) and the Imotus (subsea) control software. The
communication between the two major SCI’s is either through
the fiber-optic cable, acoustic telemetry, or a blue light modem.
The communication protocol allows both asynchronous and
synchronous communication styles.
The Control GUI provides the user interface for the
operators. Its primary functions include communicating with
Imotus using available telemetry options, providing calibration
and tuning features, and logging synchronous and
asynchronous data.
On the subsea side, the Imotus control software was
developed using C++ and Python. The software runs on Linux
(Ubuntu 16.04 LTS) on the PC/104 stack. Robot Operating
System (ROS) is used as the middleware. Imotus-1 uses ROS
“Kinematic Kame”. Imotus-V will use ROS “Melodic
Morenia”. The ROS middleware architecture employs the
master/slave node paradigm. The bridge software was designed
to allow communication between LabVIEW (used to
implement the GUI) and ROS.
The Imotus control software architecture consists of three
major modules (collection of various ROS nodes) as
demonstrated in Fig. 5.
Fig. 5. High-level Imotus embedded software diagram
Executive Module: Executive nodes are responsible for
receiving and executing human-readable mission plan
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instructions from the surface GUI. The execution of the
mission produces a sequence of operations (task verbs) that are
translated into corresponding changes to the machine state
variables (setpoints, interlocks, limits, calibration, etc.) which
drive inputs for controllers, actuator, relays etc. within the
control nodes).
Control Module: Control nodes receive inputs from the
execution layer (such as setpoints) and the perception layer
(feedback) and in turn generate command outputs to the
thrusters. The setpoints are given in terms of desired depth,
heading and position values with respect to a user–defined
coordinate frame and are fed into the control module.
Perception Module: This module’s nodes receive the on-
board sensor data and perform sensor fusion for navigation and
localisation.
D. Docking Interface
The subsea dock communicates to the shore over Ethernet,
through a subsea cable and shore side interface box. This can
optionally be upgraded to a fiber link to increase the dock’s
distance from the shore station. The subsea dock can
alternately be attached to an ocean observatory node. This will
operate in a similar fashion but will require different
installation methods. Power is delivered to the subsea dock
through the same cable.
State-of-the-art pinless connector technology is utilized on
the dock to transfer power and to provide pinless access to
highspeed communications. These are used to recharge
batteries, to download mission data, and upload new tasks.
Combined, these functionalities enable long term ‘resident’
deployments of Imotus.
A mechanical funnel is used to assist in the vehicle’s
alignment with the dock for the last few centimeters. This
allows for accurate and repeatable docking. To further aid the
open-water operation of the vehicle, a positive engagement
lock is considered for future designs. The docking sequence is
shown in Fig. 6.
Fig. 6. Docking sequence of the Imotus vehicle, shown without the vehicle
skin
This dock has an acoustic transceiver, blue light modem, a
pinless connector for inductive charging, and a camera. The
acoustic transceiver is used as a ranging signal and beacon,
giving the vehicle critical navigation information for docking.
The blue light modem is able to provide an alert to shore if a
problem is encountered during docking, with real-time video
 and telemetry relayed to the shore. The combination of the blue
light modem, camera and lights allow for a shore-based user to
assist in docking if a problem is encountered. The prototype of
the subsea docking infrastructure is shown in Figure 7 below.
Fig. 7. Subsea docking infrastructure prototype
While docked, the vehicle batteries use inductive charging
via the aforementioned pinless connector. The pinless nature
of the connector allows for easier docking, as it is inherently
insensitive to alignment and orientation. In between missions,
the vehicle autonomously docks subsea and both payload data
and vehicle health become available to a shore-based
supervisor. If the vehicle health is a concern, the dock camera
and lights can be utilized to further assess the health of the
vehicle prior to the next mission.
III. VEHICLE CAPABILITIES
A. Navigation
To accurately estimate the Imotus motion, the navigation
system uses an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). The EKF
blends multiple and redundant sensor measurements with a
process model through the minimization of the estimation of
the error variance in order to generate low-noise and high
update rate state information. During the state estimation, the
EKF predicts the system state based on the process model, and
then blends this state information with the sensor measurement.
Blending is performed based on the statistical knowledge
regarding the available sensor set and the process model.
The core EKF implementation performs sensor fusion
using a pressure depth sensor, a Doppler Velocity Log (DVL)
and a North-seeking Fiber Optic Gyro (FOG), which
collectively provide dead-reckoning that is used for navigation
beyond the nominal 1km acoustic range of the dock. Within
acoustic range, the system utilizes acoustic position fixes to aid
the navigation solution. The acoustic system is suitable for
open-water, harbors, or even deep ocean.
B. Sensing
Imotus-V provides autonomous transit from seafloor to
surface and back to the dock with a nominal payload of a CTD
and an upward facing acoustic Doppler current profiler
(ADCP). Sensor measurements can be scheduled on a routine
basis or can be triggered by variances in the perceived
quantities, enabling the observation of long or short duration
environmental changes. Environmentally sensitive areas that
require continuous environmental monitoring can be served by
installing a dock within 1km of the region of interest. In this
way, the amount of transit to the sensitive areas is significantly
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reduced and real-time data can be sent back to the shore-based
facilities.
Inherent to the Imotus vehicle is the ability to survey
multiple areas in one mission. A mission plan can be set to help
determine where certain events will be occurring based on
environmental parameters. Once a certain anomaly is detected,
Imotus is able to react based on its sensor findings. This may
include changing direction to determine the source, or
returning to the dock to report directly back. If a specific
reading is desired, Imotus is able to return to the same spot at a
frequency determined by the operator. Imotus can also take
multiple vertical profiles in a pattern surrounding the event of
interest.
Hydrothermal vents and plumes can be investigated
utilizing specialized sensing suites on Imotus. The upward
pointing ADCP data is autonomously monitored to prevent
transit across thermoclines that could impact the data from the
USBL.
IV. UPCOMING TESTING AND DESIGN VALIDATION
A. Confined Space
The Imotus vehicle is currently scheduled for an inspection
job within an oil-rig leg in the North Sea. This is a complex
confined space, with partial knowledge of the interior
environment. For this mission, Imotus will require two main
configurations: mapping and inspection.
In the mapping configuration, the goal is to make the
vehicle as snag resistant and compact as possible. Utilizing the
proprietary navigation solutions developed, the vehicle will
map the environment, and provide this to the operators. Once
this map has been created and a path to the desired inspection
point has been determined, Imotus will be reconfigured.
The inspection configuration will be used when the space
has been mapped and a suitable safe route has been
determined. In this configuration, a few additional sensors may
be utilized, such as a cleaner arm or an ultrasonic thickness
gauge. These increase the risk of snagging on an unknown
obstacle.
In both of the above configurations, the Imotus vehicle
automatically generates an emergency “escape” route based on
reversing the vehicle’s path. This escape route is continuously
updated as the vehicle progresses further into the environment
and can handle an arbitrary number of heading, depth and
position changes. Additionally, the fiber-optic umbilical gives
the operator near real-time information during the dive.
However, if the umbilical is snagged, Imotus can sever it and
return to the pick-up location by autonomously executing the
escape route.
This inspection job in confined spaces is expected to extend
to additional legs in the North Sea after the successful
completion of the first inspection.
B. Open-water
A series of barge and dock tests are planned for the Imotus
vehicle in Q4 2018. These initial tests will be completed in
Burrard Inlet within the Port of Vancouver, BC.
 Open-water navigation of the Imotus vehicle will be the
primary focus of these tests. This includes verifying the
interfaces to the selected hardware and the communication &
positioning performance. Specific tests will include the ability
to use the acoustic systems to bring the vehicle into range of
the dock where high bandwidth data transmission will be
automatically initiated. The actual in-operation ranges
achievable on each device will also be tested.
These trials will include a series of docking tests. One focus
will be to determine and improve upon the accuracy of
unassisted docking in open-water. One particular metric will be
the charging and data transfer rates achieved after Imotus
docks. This will be verified to ensure there are no unexpected
changes based upon the orientation or number of docking
procedures completed.
Biofouling and mechanical wear of both the vehicle and
dock will be monitored throughout the open-water testing. Any
specific materials, locations, or devices that show unexpected
degradation will be further examined and either upgraded or
replaced.
Additional plans for testing include longer, multi-month
missions. These will help to verify the resident functionality of
the vehicle and provide further information on reliability.
V. CONCLUSIONS
A resident Imotus AUV will provide a higher frequency of
inspection, with improved consistency. As the Imotus vehicle
inherently knows where it is, inspections are made from
exactly the same point every time. Additionally, these
inspections are completed for considerably less cost (no ship
time after the initial deployment).
Imotus-V will provide enhanced agility for adaptive subsea
monitoring while leveraging navigation solutions developed
for confined spaces. The full solution integrates a subsea dock
to enable long-term resident deployments. Preliminary testing
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on the system has shown positive results, and additional testing
and design validation in both confined spaces and open-water
is planned in the near future.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Cellula Robotics would like to thank Ocean Networks
Canada (ONC) and the Industrial Research Assistance Program
(IRAP) for their support in the docking demonstration of
Imotus.
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