Underwater Docking of an AUV Using a Visual Servo Controller

비쥬얼 서보 제어기를 이용한 자율무인잠수정의 도킹

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are unmanned underwater vessels to investigate sea environments, oceanography and deep-sea resources autonomously. Docking systems are required to increase the capability of the AUVs to recharge the batteries and to transmit data in real time for specific underwater works, such as repeated jobs at sea bed. This paper presents a visual servo control system for an AUV to dock into an underwater station with a camera mounted at the nose center of the AUV. To make the visual servo control system, this paper derives an optical flow model of a camera, where the projected motions of the image plane are described with the rotational and translational velocities of the AUV. This paper combines the optical flow equation of the camera with the AUVs equation of motion, and derives a state equation for the visual servoing AUV. This paper proposes a discrete-time MIMO controller minimizing a cost function. The control inputs of the AUV are automatically generated with the projected target position on the CCD plane of the camera and with the AUVs motion. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the modeling and the control law of the visual servoing AUV, simulations on docking the AUV to a target station are performed with the 6-dof nonlinear equations of REMUS AUV and a CCD camera.