Design and Implementation of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle KAURO

Docyong Kim, Gonyop Kim, Donghoon Kim, Jinmyung Jung, Moonshik Shin, Hyun Myung, Doheon Lee

KAIST Robotics Program

Abstract
This paper presents the design and the implementation of KAURO (KAist Underwater RObot) that participates in AUVSI & ONRs 13th International Autonomous

can be detected using two cameras mounted on the robot. In order to complete the missions in the competition, the similar environment has been set in the swimming pool and the experiments have been carried out.

Underwater Vehicle Competition. KAURO is a small sized AUV that has been motivated and designed after a sea turtle. It is equipped with six thrusters in order to control its five degrees of freedom. A cylindrical hull is mounted between two anodized aluminum plates and all the electronic parts are located inside the hull. A number of sensors are mounted on the AUV and they include depth sensor, AHRS (Attitude and Heading Reference System), and two cameras. It is powered by two Li-Polymer batteries and the operation time is approximately 2 hours. The software has two hierarchical levels the upper level for the navigation and the lower for the thruster control. The performance of the robot has been verified in the experiments carried out in the swimming pool and improvements are still underway. The rest of the paper is organized as following. Section Fig 1. KAURO Hardware KAURO has been co-developed by KAIST Bio-System Lab Robotics team and Urban Robotics Lab.

1. INTRODUCTION
KAURO is a small sized AUV that has been motivated and designed after a sea turtle, as it was in the previous versions. It is equipped with six thrusters for elaborate movements in limited space and eco-friendly external design has been applied for the appearance. The navigation of the robot is guided by the artificial visual structures that 1

Two explains the details of the hardware system and Section Three addresses the design and the implementation of the software system. And Section Four presents the conclusions.

2. HARDWARE SYSTEM
A. System Overview

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This section describes the hardware of KAURO. An acrylic cylindrical hull is mounted between two anodized aluminum plates and four SUS (Steel Use Stainless) rods are placed between the plates in order to resist the shear stress. Four thrusters are mounted on the plates and two are on the SUS rods. The electronic components are equipped inside the hull and they can be grouped into three parts: the control, sensor, and power units. Fig. 2 shows the diagram of the electronic components.

hull.

The appearance of KAURO is designed after a sea turtle and the exterior is made of ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene Copolymer) material. The friendly appearance of the robot not only appeals to humans but also assimilates well with the environments.

Fig 3. Thruster(SBT-150)

The driving equipments of KAURO are Seabotix SBT150 thrusters. As shown in Fig. 3, four thrusters are Fig 2. System Diagram fixed on the front and rear plates, two on each plate, and two thrusters are mounted on the left and right sides. This

B. External Design and Driving Equipments

External of KAURO can be divided into four parts frame, hull, exterior, and driving equipments. The frame is manufactured with anodized aluminum and the four rods that hold the aluminum plates made of SUS material for corrosion resistance and sustention. The external dimension of the robot is shown in Table 1.

configuration of the thrusters enables elaborate movements of the robot by controlling its five degrees of freedom. Each thruster is driven by 24V with 4A peak current.

Length (mm) Width (mm) Height (mm) Weight (kg)

900 900 400 35

Acrylic cylindrical hull is closed with hull caps on both sides and two O-rings are mounted on each hull cap for waterproof structure. The hull is successfully tested at 1 bar of pressure and it is planned to be tested at 2 bars for the verification. Waterproof connectors are used to connect the driving equipments with the electronics inside the hull. A separate connector for LAN communication is equipped for remote operations. Table 2 shows the specification of the 2

Table 1. External Dimension of KAURO

Length (mm) Diameter (mm) Volume (liter) Weight (kg) Material

590 200 18.53 10 Acryl

Table 2. Hull Specification

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The two USB cameras, one at the front and the other at

C. Control Units
There are two control units in the hardware system Navigation Controller and Motor Controller. Navigation controller is a seven inch Pentium Dual-core SBC (Single Board Computer) from Intel. The operating system on SBC is Windows XP and the main program that controls the whole system is installed in this unit.

the bottom, are mounted onboard as the main environment sensors. Using two cameras, the dual-cam system has been constructed where the front and the bottom visions can be monitored selectively. The views of the two cameras do not overlap and therefore the system is considered as two separate mono-vision systems. However, since the sizes of the artificial structures are known in the environment, the distance between the robot and the structures can be

Motor Controller is equipped with TMS320F2808 MCU from Texas Instruments. The PCB board has been designed so that it contains the MCU and the power distribution circuits. This board sends the PWM signal to the motor drivers to control the thruster speeds. For each thruster, two H-bridges are used to supply the driving current to the motor drivers.

estimated by calculating the proportion ratios.

Additional

sensors

including

GPS

and

Marine

Environment Monitoring sensors (water temperature, salinity, Oxygen saturation rate sensors) are planned to be mounted in the near future.

E. Power Units D. Sensors

Three types of sensors are mounted on the system and they include the pressure sensor, AHRS (Attitude Heading Reference System), and USB cameras. The power units are not only the heaviest parts among the electronics, but also it takes the most volumes in the hull. The batteries have been chosen with large amount of consideration so that the weights and the volumes are suitable while giving reasonable operation time. The The pressure sensors can measure the water depth and the values are represented as the VDC output signals. The model that has been implemented in KAURO is ECM-01 and it is capable of measuring water depth up to 100m with the resolution about 10cm. It is mounted on the front hull cap, where the sensor tip is exposed to the water. the load resistance in the sensor has been set to 330 ohms so that it operates in the current-based system. Type Voltage (V) Current AHRS is a 3-axis sensor that provides the heading, attitude, and yaw information. It consists of gyroscopes, accelerometers, and geomagnetic sensors in all three axes. It is placed at the center of the vehicle. 3
KAIST Underwater Robotics

operation time is designed to be more than two hours. The detail information regarding the power units are shown in Table 3.

Motor Controller

Navigation Controller

Li-Polymer 22.2 30 30 20 31214650 3.0 Table 3. Power Units 10 15614650 1.5

Discharge Rate (C) Capacity (Ah) Size (LWH) Weight (kg)

KAURO

manager is in charge of the decision making based on the data processing results. Vision processing part receives the

3. KAURO Software system

A. Overall System
KAURO has two hierarchical levels of control software upper level for the navigation control and the lower for thruster control. The navigation controller is a .NET based MFC (Windows programming) program. It is in charge of serial communications for the sensors and image acquisition from the USB cameras. With the data being gathered, it calculates the desired heading, speed, and depth of the robot. These values are then sent to the thruster controller by serial communication. The thruster controller, a firmware written on the microcontroller, compares these desired values with the current sensor values. It controls the thruster speeds using PD controller in order to reach the desired robot pose.

current situation (task) from the task manager and executes appropriate image processing. Then it returns the results back to the task manager for the decision making. The data manager is in charge of managing the data from the thruster controller and storing the data in the right format so that the task manager can make use of them.

B. System Structure
Fig. 4 shows the structure of the KAURO software. The detailed descriptions of the two components are addressed below. Fig 5. Buoy Detection

Fig 4. Power Units Fig 6. Path Marker Alignment The navigation control is composed of three parts: task manager, vision processing, and data manager. The task 4
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program supervised by the NIPA(National IT Industry Promotion Agency) (NIPA-2010-C1090-1021-0012)

References
[1] Thor I. Fossen, Guidance and control of ocean vehicles., John Wiley & Sons, 1994 [2] Rafael C. Gonzalez and Richard E. Woods, Digital Image Processing, Prentice-Hall, 2002 [3] Sangwhan Jeong and Moonho Lee, Practical computer vision Fig 7. Weapon Detection Programming using VC++ and OpenCV,

Hongreung Science, 2007 [4] D Wettergreen, et. al, "Development of a VisuallyGuided Autonomous Underwater Vehicle", OCEANS, 1998, Conference Proceedings

Thruster controller employs the timer interrupt routine in DSP and receives the data from the depth sensor and the two batteries using ADC. Serial communication A collects the data from AHRS and serial communication B receives the target control values from the navigation controller in SBC. PD controller is used for thruster control using the received data.

4. Conclusions
The design and the implementation of KAURO have been presented in this paper. Its unique appearance and frame structures are to be revealed at the competition in July 2010. The goal is to complete as many missions as possible with the minimum sensors mounted on the AUV.

Acknowledgment
This research was supported by the MKE(The Ministry of Knowledge Economy), Korea, under the ITRC(Information Technology Research Center) support 5
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