A design of tiny basin test-bed for AUV multi agent

In this paper, we present a design of a tiny AUV test-bed for basin experiment in the development of AUV multi-agent technology. The multi-agent technology using many types of underwater robot has great potential for the near future underwater actvities. For example, in such fields as water pollution investigation, aquaculture control, or coral reef research, I feel a growing need for a system that realizes underwater continuous monitoring in the wide range. In this case, the target monitoring area will be sliced planar hierarchically toward the depth as monitoring layers, and many AUVs arranged on each layer track the given trajectory and gather various environmental information continuously, with communicating each other in the layer or with other layers. Other concepts are gaining manganese modules using many robots with manipulators or deepwater automated construction of offshore subsea structures. To realize those concepts we need to develop AUV multi-agent technologies. We must experience many situations and problems to be solved in that development by using real systems as well as our computer simulations. So we are now building basic systems of basin experiment for the development of AUV multi-agent behavior. In this paper we introduce our concept of the experiment in the near future and the hardware/software design of our tiny AUV test-bed and presice ultrasound ranging system now we are developing. The tiny AUV is designed for the basin experiment using a 7inches-diameter acrylic sphere with low-cost embedded system with DOS/V PC104 based subsystems. The 1MHz carrier frequency ultrasoung ranging sytem was tested.