An underwater docking system based on UUV and recovery mother ship: design and experiment

Abstract

The research focuses on the autonomous docking of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) to a recovery mother ship. Firstly, a novel fork-pole docking station was designed, which could operate independently or be transported onboard a recovery mother ship. Subsequently, a docking guidance scheme combining long-range acoustic guidance and short-range opti-acoustic guidance was proposed. Acoustic guidance employed ultra-short baseline sonar and acoustic beacons to measure relative position information, while optical guidance utilized camera and L-shaped light arrays to obtain relative pose information. Then, an opti-acoustic complementary recovery control strategy was developed to address the instability of acoustic signals. Finally, experimental tests were conducted in a pool to evaluate the performance of the proposed recovery docking system in both static and dynamic docking scenarios, which demonstrated that the docking system was capable of achieving fully autonomous recovery of UUV. Furthermore, the experimental data analysis shows that the presented recovery control strategy is effective and feasible.