Guidance and Control of an Autonomous Underwater Robot for Tracking and Monitoring Spilled Plumes of Oil and Gas From Seabed

Heavy disasters of oil spill bring enormous damage on the ocean environment as well as regional economies. Once gas blows out from seabed by an accident of subsea oil production system or by a seismic activity, it seriously damages not only ships and airplanes, but also natural environment. To know when, where and how much the spilled oil and gas float up on the sea surface, and where the floating oil on the sea surface drift ashore, we need information of advection, diffusion and dispersion of underwater oil and gas, and its prediction. This paper describes the guidance control simulation for designing the underwater robot SOTAB-I (SOTAB; Spilled Oil Tracking Autonomous Buoy) that tracks spilled oil autonomously and gathers oceanographic data. Numerical simulation was adopted to estimate the maneuverability of this robot. To compute the hydrodynamic derivatives of the robot, USAF DATCOM Method and CFD were used.