Design of a Control System for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle EDYSYS1

Abstract

This paper describes the design of a control system for an autonomous underwater vehicle EDYSYS 1. An autonomous underwater vehicle is an unmanned and self-propelled underwater vessel that can operate independently underwater and carry out several missions as assigned to it compared to a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) which is usually tethered to a ship or some other moored water vehicle. Intelligent design of control systems for autonomous underwater vehicles is an active area of research giving the demands for autonomy and the capacity for intelligent systems to satisfy such demands. A control system has been designed with the Raspberry Pi 4 computer as the main control unit. Various subsystems and sensors for data acquisition by the vehicle are controlled by the Raspberry Pi 4 which has the Robot Operating System (ROS) configured in it. The necessary intelligence for controlling each sensor is configured using Python programming language. The relevant Python scripts are thereafter implemented as nodes within the ROS framework. By calling the relevant nodes in ROS, various values of sensory data were obtained by the designed system in the ROS environment. Successful communication via LoRa was also achieved.