A hovering micro autonomous underwater vehicle with integrated control and positioning system

Abstract

Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is currently the mainstream equipment for ocean exploration due to its long endurance and large operating range. However, the torpedo profile of traditional AUVs limits their maneuverability and hovering capabilities. This hinders the application and popularity of AUVs in near-seabed operations and accurate detection in small areas. This paper presents a novel disc-shaped micro AUV characterized by using a multi-core heterogeneous architecture to integrate control and positioning systems to obtain a lightweight design with complete functionality. Through the special structure and adaptive sliding mode controller, it can achieve high maneuvering navigation and stable hovering under different working conditions. A passive inverted ultra-short baseline (piUSBL) underwater positioning system is developed to provide accurate and instantaneous underwater position at low cost and power consumption. Field experiments, including special circular cruising and acoustic docking, were conducted in an open-water environment. The experimental results show that this vehicle has a depth control accuracy of 5 cm and a heading control accuracy of 3°, which well proves that this prototype can carry out accurate detection in a small range. In addition, this vehicle has a diameter of only 42 cm, a height of 23 cm, and a weight of 14 kg, making it easy to deploy and recover. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first AUV to be successfully tested in the field using a multi-core heterogeneous architecture with such small size and light weight.