Towards Teleoperation and Automatic Control Features of an Unmanned Surface Vessel-ROV System: Preliminary Results

This paper presents the design, construction and control of an Unmanned Surface Vessel (USV) along with a ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) system, called USV-ROV system. These systems are mainly used for underwater inspection of shallow water structures, such as: ports, bridges bases and platforms. The USVROV, developed at CIDESI-Mexico, has been designed for academic purposes. This paper describes the Surface Control Unit (SCU), the ROV and the USV, including: electronics architecture, data managing, sensors, actuators and mechanical design considerations. USV and ROV control strategies preliminary results are presented. Real time experiments are shown for: USV heading control, and ROV depth and heading control. The goal of this paper is to present preliminary results of a coordinated USV-ROV system, desgined for the development of inspection and surveillance techniques accroding to the marine and submarine application; however, these techniques are not commercially available and have to be developed with an open architecture system like the presented here.