An autonomous unmanned underwater control test vehicle: platform description and experiments

This paper presents an autonomous unmanned underwater vehicle (AUUV) that can be used as a support tool for research tasks in underwater exploration, and as a platform to test different control, communication, or vision algorithms. The vehicle operates without an external power cable and with an original modular program where a web page is enabled as a graphical user interface for wireless communication with the vehicle when it is not submerged. The modular design of the program, based on open-source libraries, allows updating or modifying the configuration of each of its main modules: control, inertial unit, and vision. Experimental results are shown to validate the performance of the proposed vehicle, implementing a non-linear control that includes a PID for the trajectory tracking of its pose (position and orientation).