Autonomous docking of hovering type AUV to seafloor charging station based on acoustic and visual sensing
Autor: | Takumi Matsuda, Yoshiki Sato, Toshihiro Maki, Takashi Sakamaki, Kotohiro Masuda |
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Rok vydání: | 2017 |
Předmět: |
0209 industrial biotechnology
Engineering Landmark 010505 oceanography business.industry 02 engineering and technology Visual localization Human control 01 natural sciences Seafloor spreading Charging station 020901 industrial engineering & automation Electric power transmission Forward looking Underwater business 0105 earth and related environmental sciences Marine engineering |
Zdroj: | 2017 IEEE Underwater Technology (UT). |
DOI: | 10.1109/ut.2017.7890282 |
Popis: | Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have advantage that they do not require tether cables or human control. AUVs have recently been used for seafloor observation. However, AUVs have limitation of their batteries. AUVs must be recovered before they have run out of batteries. In order to charge batteries of AUVs, underwater charging systems have attracted a lot of attention. We have developed the seafloor charging station for hovering type AUVs. In the proposed system, AUVs dock to the seafloor station autonomously according to both acoustic and visual landmarks attached on the seafloor station. If AUVs are far away the seafloor station, AUVs approach the seafloor station by acoustic positioning device. When AUVs get close enough to observe the visual landmark, AUVs approach landing point of the seafloor station by visual localization in addition to the acoustic positioning device. The visual landmark consists of 4 LED markers. AUVs observe the LED markers by forward looking camera and calculate the position of themselves relative to the seafloor station. After reaching the landing point, AUVs dock to the seafloor station by descending. When the docking is completed, the seafloor station starts electric power transmission by our newly developed non-contact charging devices. The performance of the proposed system was verified through a series of tank and sea experiments. In this paper, the results of the autonomous docking and battery charging experiments using a hovering type AUV Tri-TON 2, are described. |
Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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