Experimental Study on Underwater Docking of a Visual Servoing Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

비쥬얼 서보 자율무인잠수정의 수중 도킹에 관한 실험적 연구

The Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering (KRISO), the ocean engineering branch of KORDI, has designed and manufactured a model of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to test underwater docking. This paper introduces the AUV model, ASUM, equipped with a visual servo control system to dock into an underwater station with a camera and motion sensors. To make a visual servoing AUV, this paper implemented the visual servo control system designed with an augmented state equation, which was composed of the optical flow model of a camera and the equation of the AUV's motion. The system design and the hardware configuration of ASUM are presented in this paper. A small long baseline acoustic positioning system was developed to monitor and record the AUV's position for the experiment in the Ocean Engineering Basin of KRISO, KORDI. ASUM recognizes the target position by processing the captured image for the lights, which are installed around the end of the cone-type entrance of the duct. Unfortunately, experiments are not yet conducted when we write this article. The authors will present the results for the docking test of the AUV in near future.