Development of Low Cost Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Platform

This paper presents the development of a low-cost autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). For research, industrial and military underwater applications, AUVs are generally used, which modeling, system identification and control of these vehicles pose serious challenges due to the vehicles’ complex, inherently nonlinear, and time-varying dynamics. Here, the AUV is considered to have 6-DOF for the development of the electrical, electronics, power distribution, sensors, and actuators. A low-cost IMU is used along with other reasonably low-cost detectors, such as a magnetometer and a water pressure sensor for depth evaluation. This study addresses the configuration and selection of the onboard instruments required to collect data using a processing unit (PC104) based on-board data logger to record complete manoeuvring data obtained from various sensors and process it based on the experiment. Real-time validations using Hardware-in-Loop (HIL) simulations are carried out. HIL simulations help to simulate the behavior of the developed model for surge, pitch and yaw movement, and also it makes clear that the used identification methods are feasible for real time control. Real time experiments are carried out with the developed 6-DOF instrumented AUV platform in various conditions and environments to validate its dynamics identification with adaptive controller and the results are presented for surge, the control of pitch, and yaw. The results revealed that the adaptive controller can effectively control the developed AUV and show its robust properties in the real world.