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Underwater environments are highly unstructured, uncertain, and dynamic. However, over the past three decades many autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have been developed and successfully deployed for various oceanographic applications. There is a growing need for the AUVs to be reliable for collecting useful data and samples for their users. An AUV is a typical one-of-a-kind product for which it is difficult to derive a mathematical/statistical model for reliability prediction. The failure modes effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) can produce more effective results. However, the assessment of reliability growth of an AUV is very important for predicting its operational success in challenging underwater environments. In this paper, we present the identification of different types of failures that occurred during the past one and a half years of operation of MBARI's Dorado AUV, classification of those failures, and the reliability growth analysis for the vehicle. Reliability issues of various subsystems and operational procedure of the AUV have also been discussed. An extensive analysis of operational data and test results are presented in this paper.
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Podder et al. (2005) studied this question.