A Portable Autonomous Underwater Vehicle With Multi-Thruster Propulsion: Design, Development, and Vision-Based Tracking Control

Abstract

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) play a pivotal role in the exploration of marine resources. With the increasing complexity of underwater tasks, conventional torpedo-shaped AUVs exhibit significant limitations, particularly in complex and dynamic environments, due to restricted lateral translation and in-place rotation capabilities. To address these challenges, this letter introduces OpenAUV, a novel AUV design featuring a redundant multi-thruster configuration that enables full omnidirectional motion. The enhanced maneuverability significantly improves performance in underwater tracking tasks. Furthermore, OpenAUV's portability, cost-effectiveness, and open-source framework make it highly suitable for a wide range of scientific research applications. Comprehensive kinematics and dynamics models of OpenAUV are developed with hydrodynamic coefficients identified through computational fluid dynamics simulations. A vision-based tracking Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) play a pivotal role in the exploration of marine resources. With the increasing complexity of underwater tasks, conventional torpedo-shaped AUVs exhibit significant limitations, particularly in complex and dynamic environments, due to restricted lateral translation and in-place rotation capabilities. To address these challenges, this letter introduces OpenAUV, a novel AUV design featuring a redundant multi-thruster configuration that enables full omnidirectional motion. The enhanced maneuverability significantly improves performance in underwater tracking tasks. Furthermore, OpenAUV's portability, cost-effectiveness, and open-source framework make it highly suitable for a wide range of scientific research applications. Comprehensive kinematics and dynamics models of OpenAUV are developed with hydrodynamic coefficients identified through computational fluid dynamics simulations. A vision-based tracking control system is designed to facilitate accurate maneuvers. Extensive experimental tests are conducted in a laboratory pool, the results of which confirms the effectiveness of the proposed design.