Sensor Proccessing and Behaviour Control of a Small AUV

This paper presents the design of the electronics, the sensor data processing scheme and the implementation of the behaviour based control for a small autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The robot has a volume of 12dm3 and is used as a demonstration vehicle for underwater ai-technologies. The thruster configuration allows the μAUV to hover and its active light sensors enable obstacle detection abilities. The control features several behaviours like obstacle detection and depth sensor calibration and is completely autonomous. An ATMegal28 functions as onboard CPU and due to the limited computing power we use a special scheduling algorithm which also acts as the behaviour arbiter.