Design and Development of a Littoral AUV for Underwater Target Localization and Homing Using Vision and SONAR Module

This paper presents the design and development of a modular littoral autonomous underwater vehicle called “ZYRA” having six degrees of freedom for performing the following tasks underwater: target (sound sources emitting frequencies between 1？Hz and 180？KHz) localization and homing, buoy detection. The development of the AUV has been divided into, namely, five sections: mechanical design and fabrication, embedded and power systems, control and software, image processing, and underwater acoustics. A fully functional AUV has been tested in a self-created arena with different tasks spread out in a shallow water environment. Two different kinds of experimental results have been presented: first the experimental results of the SONAR module and second based on the number of successful outcomes per total number of trials for each task. 1. Introduction Autonomous Underwater Vehicle is powerful and complex system which is capable of performing underwater (shallow and deep sea) tasks. The range encompasses bathymetry calculation, detection of faults in oil pipelines, collection of deep sea water samples, fish population estimation, collection of marine data, strategic and commercial applications like underwater surveillance and reconnaissance, recovery and monitoring of submerged installations, and even complex tasks like collecting data which aids in understanding global warming. The aim is to design and develop an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle which will serve as a technology demonstrator which is highly compact, multirole, and can be used for various missions with the independence of choosing payload. ZYRA (see Figures 1 and 3) is the product of completely refined mechanical assembly, control systems, embedded systems, vision system, and acoustics module. The mechanical model of ZYRA is designed to be in hydrodynamically stable equilibrium both below and above water surface. The mechanical system consists of main pressure hull, front and back lids, frame, and electronics rack, and the mechanical dimension aspects are mentioned in Table 1. The focus of embedded and the power systems department is mainly on the implementation of acoustic positioning module, actuator board, and the designing of a power distribution board for diverting power to various modules on the AUV [1]. The various COTS equipment integrated in the vehicle are tabulated in Table 2. Dynamic control is achieved by retrieval of coordinates using various PID control algorithms [2, 3]. The software is designed to run in decentralized multithreaded agent architecture, with the threads handling