Underwater ROV as Inspection and Development Platform

Proceedings of the ASME 2010 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition, 2010

This work addresses the development of an underwater remotely operated vehicle ({ROV}), required to obtain reliable visual information, used for surveillance and maintenance of ship shells and underwater structures of Colombian port facilities and oceanographic research. The most relevant design constraints were evaluated considering environmental conditions, dimensional restrictions, hydrostatics, hydrodynamics, degrees of freedom and the availability of instrumentation and control hardware. The mechanical/naval design was performed through an iterative process by using computational tools {CAD}/{CAE}/{CFD}. The hardware architecture was divided in three layers: instrumentation, communications and control. The software was developed using ANSI C with Embedded Linux operating system. The guidance and navigation system used the Kalman filter to estimate the state of the vehicle. The vehicle can operate in manual and semi-automatic modes. In the semi-automatic, the position of a joystick is converted into the velocity set-points that are integrated to get the yaw and depth commands for the PID controllers. The rigorous design and a consistent construction processes allowed the development of a robust and reliable robotic system that constitutes an innovative product in Colombia.

Sukkur IBA Journal of Emerging Technologies, 2018

Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV) are the robots that are used to monitor underwater environment at remote distance, either for inspection of underwater wreckage or for surveillance of underwater environment. Any such robot due to harshness of environment conditions needs a robust watertight design and requires various sensors for effective environment monitoring. The entire UUV structure is comprised of the vehicle, which is linked with operators on top of the surface by a set of cables that hold relevant cables for data and power communication. In this context, a lightweight underwater vehicle was designed using PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride) pipes and equipped with brushless DC motors, electronic speed controller, relay module, sonar, claw arm and Camera. It can navigate in six directions (up, down, left, right, forward, backward) and camera allows underwater surveillance of the environment, with sonar helping to indicate the target depth. The designed UUV can also perform basic pick and place task using a claw arm and is remotely operated using a joystick controller. Overall, the designed UUV prototype has shown its potential capabilities for underwater surveillance and environment monitoring through practical demonstrations.

Jurnal Teknologi, 2014

Remotely operated underwater vehicles which are also known as ROVs are a type of underwater robot vehicle which is widely used in the offshore industry or other applications. The main purpose of this type of tethered underwater mobile robots are tosupersede human to work at hard-to-access or jeopardizing underwater region to do certain specific tasks like to survey a site, search for an item or person that has tremendous value. The remote control of ROV is usually carried out through copper or fiber optic cables which are known as umbilical cables. In this research work a low cost ROV unit has been designed and constructed at UniversitiTeknologi Malaysia (UTM). The ROV was constructed by low cost material like commercial grade polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipes. The low cost ROV is equipped with a network camera and manoeuvred by three motors through 12 volts battery power supply. The ROV is controlled by joystick controller through network cable and is able to submerge up to 20meters intowater to perform underwater observation operation.

—Remotely operated underwater vehicles or ROVs are underwater robots that are used in science, entertainment, military and offshore oil industries. Their main function is to interact with the environment under the water in various ways. It is a very complicated system and uncommon in the developing or the underdeveloped countries around the world. Countries consisting many water bodies and prone to maritime incidents ROVs can be very useful in rescue missions. In this research work we built a ROV and equipped it with a surveillance system. Our ROV will be quite useful beside rescuers by monitoring the underwater and sending the video. It can also be used in military, scientific research, film making under the water and monitoring underwater industrial structures and underwater network devices.

1993

Underwater robotic vehicles (URYs) have been used for various tasks in the underwater environment. The development of advanced vehicle technologies is accelerated by the demand for an URY with high performance and efficient operation. URYs are the integration of various subsystems such as sensor systems and guidance & control systems. In the Autonomous Systems Laboratory, an autonomous U RY was designed and its first model was built as a part of our research in developing a low-cost test platform for advanced vehicle technologies. This paper describes major components of the vehicle and its mechanical & electrical structure. The vehicle system and recent results are to be presented during the conference. t This work was partially supported by (RjDE.

This paper presents a description of a very low cost underwater vehicle project, specifically about a remotely operating vehicle (ROV). The main motivation of this research is based on the fact that underwater robotics in Brazil is a recent scientific domain, particularly in experimental aspects. A few project specifications were established, and the actuators, sensors, structure and onboard electronics were projected and constructed. The ROV developed, named ROVFURG-I, has four actuators (motor with helices) and three sensors: two accelerometers (each one working in two axes) and one girometer. There are four degrees of freedom actively controlled. The project was made with two degrees of freedom controlled in passive form (roll and pith angles). The inertial trajectories were obtained with sensors data. However, errors inevitably are integrated and with forty seconds of trajectory the errors become significant.

Volume 7: Dynamic Systems and Control; Mechatronics and Intelligent Machines, Parts A and B, 2011

This is report of design, construction and control of "Ariana-I", an Underwater Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV), built in Shiraz University Robotic Lab. This ROV is equipped with roll, pitch, heading, and depth sensors which provide sufficient feedback signals to give the system six degrees-of-freedom actuation. Although its center of gravity and center of buoyancy are positioned in such a way that Ariana-I ROV is self-stabilized, but the combinations of sensors and speed controlled drivers provide more stability of the system without the operator involvement. Video vision is provided for the system with Ethernet link to the operation unit. Control commands and sensor feedbacks are transferred on RS485 bus; video signal, water leakage alarm, and battery charging wires are provided on the same multi-core cable. While simple PI controllers would improve the pitch and roll stability of the system, various control schemes can be applied for heading to track different paths. The net weight of ROV out of water is about 130kg with frame dimensions of 130×100×65cm. Ariana-I ROV is designed such that it is possible to be equipped with different tools such as mechanical arms, thanks to microprocessor based control system provided with two directional high speed communication cables for on line vision and operation unit.

— This paper presents the design and implementation of an underwater robotic platform that can operate in both Autonomous Underwater vehicle (AUV) and Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) mode. In recent years, there is a need of underwater robotic vehicle for marine life research, mineral exploration and finding sediment pollution level. In most cases, the price of commercially available AUV or ROV is beyond reach for an individual researcher from developed countries. On the other hand, the sophistication level of commercial vehicle might be unnecessary for many researchers, as they intended to use the vehicle for single research purpose. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation detail of simple, lightweight, low cost robotic platform. Keywords— autonomous underwater vehicle, remote operated underwater vehicle, robotics.

International Journal on Smart Sensing and Intelligent Systems

This paper presents the development of a low-cost autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). For research, industrial and military underwater applications, AUVs are generally used, which modeling, system identification and control of these vehicles pose serious challenges due to the vehicles' complex, inherently nonlinear, and time-varying dynamics. Here, the AUV is considered to have 6-DOF for the development of the electrical, electronics, power distribution, sensors, and actuators. A low-cost IMU is used along with other reasonably low-cost detectors, such as a magnetometer and a water pressure sensor for depth evaluation. This study addresses the configuration and selection of the onboard instruments required to collect data using a processing unit (PC104) based on-board data logger to record complete manoeuvring data obtained from various sensors and process it based on the experiment. Real-time validations using Hardware-in-Loop (HIL) simulations are carried out. HIL simulations help to simulate the behavior of the developed model for surge, pitch and yaw movement, and also it makes clear that the used identification methods are feasible for real time control. Real time experiments are carried out with the developed 6-DOF instrumented AUV platform in various conditions and environments to validate its dynamics identification with adaptive controller and the results are presented for surge, the control of pitch, and yaw. The results revealed that the adaptive controller can effectively control the developed AUV and show its robust properties in the real world.

ArXiv, 2020

Underwater marine inspections for ship hull or marine debris, etc. are one of the vital measures carried out to ensure the safety of marine structures and underwater species. This work details the design, development and qualification of a compact and economical observation class Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) prototype, intended for carrying out scientific research in shallow-waters. The ROV has a real-time processor and controller onboard, which synchronizes the movement of the vehicle based on the commands from the surface station. The vehicle piloting is done using the onboard Raspberry pi camera and the support of some navigation sensors like Global Positioning System (GPS), inertial, temperature, depth and pressure. This prototype of ROV is a compact unit built using a limited number of components and is suitable for underwater inspection using a single camera. The developed ROV is initially tested in a pool.