Virtual-reality-based online simulator design with a virtual simulation system for the docking of unmanned underwater vehicle

Abstract

The simulation of the docking process is an important solution for the control and navigation design of Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV), which can be used to evaluate the reliability of the algorithm in an economic way. However, most of the existing simulations are offline, which cannot interact with the real sensors mounted on the UUV, and cannot visually simulate and display the immersive motion of the UUV in the underwater environment. Therefore, to address the aforementioned problem, an online simulator is designed in this paper, which provides a virtual simulation system for the docking task simulation of the UUV. Two modes are designed with one to provide the virtual simulation with simulated UUV model and sensor, while another to provide the real platform simulation with intuitive visualization of the real tasks achieved by the recorded data. The host and lower computers are designed to communicate and exchange the data. Namely, the lower computer can calculate the mathematical model, and simulate or interact with the real sensor during the docking process; The host computer can obtain the simulated or recorded data from the lower computer, and implement the navigation and control of the UUV, which can be finally displayed in the accurately created virtual docking scene. The fuzzy PID controller and four different navigation modes are designed to implement the experiment with the specific motion verification and underwater docking for the UUV, and the results verify the effectiveness of the online simulator for the underwater tasks simulation with lower cost.