Design of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Control Unit

This paper presents a prototype design for an AUV challenge competition held in Singapore. AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) is a device that can perform independently underwater without the operator intervention. It enables human beings to explore the unknown and is widely used in underwater rescue, survey, and construction. To fulfill the requirements of various applications, the design of the AUV control unit is very crucial. In this paper, an ARM based high performance embedded system is implemented on the AUV control unit to achieve the functionalities of automatic navigation, underwater photography and underwater acoustic positioning. An industrial embedded motherboard and a STM32 ARM processor were chosen as the hardware development platform. Also a series of sensors including waterproofing camera, pressure sensor, inertial sensor and hydrophone were introduced to achieve the specific goals. Briefly, the gesture of the AUV is obtained by pressure and inertial sensors; high definition cameras along with according image processing algorithms facilitate the system with computer vision to find the object and avoid obstacles in water; the signals received by hydrophones are utilized to calculate the precise under water position of the AUV. Besides the hardware, the UC-OSII operating system on STM32 guarantees the real time control of the AUV, and C++ language on industrial embedded motherboard processes the images taken by cameras. To conclude, the closed loop of the AUV control unit is successfully designed.

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