Experimental Evaluation of the Control Architecture of an Underwater Cable Tracker

Abstract Nowadays, the surveillance and inspection of underwater installations, such as power or telecommunication cables and pipelines, are carried out by trained operators who, from the surface, control a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) with cameras mounted over it. This is a tedious, time-consuming and expensive task, prone to errors mainly because of loss of attention or fatigue of the operator and also due to the typical low quality of sea bed images. In this paper, results from the experimental evaluation of a control architecture for visually guiding an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) to detect and track an underwater power cable laid on the seabed are presented. On the one hand, the vision subsystem has been validated using sequences from a video tape obtained by means of a ROV during several tracking sessions of various real cables, while, on the other hand, the performance of the whole system has been assessed on a 3D simulator using the hydrodynamic model of a real underwater vehicle named GARBI.

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