Jonas Wuest and Pragash Sivananthaguru - Tethys Robotics

Oceans, lakes and rivers present challenging and dangerous environments due to their high turbidity levels, correspondingly poor visibility and usually very limited operating range, making it impossible for conventional underwater drones to operate reliably. To offer these capabilities that are either traditionally reserved for much larger and/or more expensive systems or do not yet exist at all (e.g for strong currents applications), we leverage the history of core research in the navigation of aerial vehicles at ETH Zürich and extend it to the underwater domain. We use especially evaluated acoustic sensors, our unique knowledge regarding navigation in turbid and cluttered areas and an innovative approach to sensor fusion to operate our small and lightweight underwater drone in a wider variety of conditions than what exists today.