Development of an intelligent autonomous underwater vehicle, P-SURO

P-SURO is a prototype autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), which is under development as a test-bed for developing underwater technologies such as underwater vision, underwater navigation, and guidance. This vehicle is a hovering type with four thrusters mounted to steer its 6DOF underwater motion, a color camera is mounted at the vehicle's nose for underwater vision, and an AHRS combined with one depth sensor and three range sonars construct an inertial navigation system. In this paper, we report the details of constructions of the vehicle system, and its three core modules - vision module, navigation module, and control module.