Development of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for Water Tunnel Inspection

In order to complete water tunnel inspection work, the development of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), which is used for visual inspection of fully filled water tunnels interior is presented in this paper. The AUV is divided into intelligent control system, navigation and positioning system, energy management system, propulsion system, and optical inspection system. The experiment results showed that the developed control algorithms, navigation and positioning algorithms, and optical inspection units all worked well. Even with very limited number of sensors onboard, the AUV still positioned accurately in the tunnel and completed the inspection work efficiently.