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Development of an autonomous underwater vehicle for census of antarctic marine life

Abstract:

This paper reports the design and construction of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) for a Census of Antarctic Marine Life near to the Ecuadorian Antarctic Station at the South Shetland Islands, Antarctica. The proposed AUV can navigate autonomously following a predefined path and has a Computer Vision System with which it be able to detect and track fish in the water column and collect small biological samples from the seabed with a gripper. The AUV has an onboard Optical Dissolved Oxygen sensor. The length of the AUV is less than 2m and has a hybrid architecture that combines the best characteristics of ROV and AUV i.e. high stability in the water column, high maneuverability at low velocity and efficient hydrodynamics. The vehicle electronics system is based on a FPGA development board and its peripherals. The Guidance, Navigation, Control (GNC) and Computer Vision (CV) routines were coded employing 32 bits floating point arithmetic and CORDIC algorithms using hardware description language VHDL. An Inertial Navigation System (INS) complemented by GPS and implemented by an Extended Kaiman Filter is included. Results derived from sea trials in Ecuadorian and Antarctic waters using the proposed system, support our approach for FPGA based GNC and CV system.