UTD Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

Michael Giambalvo, Ed Paradis, Eric Sumner

The University of Texas at Dallas

July 9, 2004

Abstract UTDs rst entry in the AUVSI underwater competition is designed around the concept of simplicity. The vehicle consists of one main thruster, four attitude thrusters, a single watertight box for electronics, and various sensors. This thruster arrangement provides pitch control, bearing control, and translational movement in the horizontal frame. Power is provided from several Nickle-Metal Hydride batteries. To reduce power and system complexity, the main controller is a 16-bit microprocessor. Sensor processing tasks such as vision and sonar localization are performed by specialized processors such as Atmel AVRs and a TI C5510 DSP, all communicating with the main controller via SPI. In order to reduce expenses, the vehicle has been closely engineered to the requirements of the competition, yet kept modular so that it may easily be adapted to future tasks.

Introduction
In order to fulll the objectives of the 2004 AUVSI underwater competition, there are several tasks which the vehicle must complete. First, it must navigate in a straight line through the validation gate and towards the target light. Next, it must release two markers into the designated target bins. Finally, it must locate and surface near an ultrasonic pinger. First and foremost, a successful vehicle must be able to travel in a straight line. Thus, the UTD vehicle is designed with a single, powerful thruster and passive frame elements that keep it dynamically stable. In addition, data from a Rotomotion IMU provides feedback that allow active stabilization of the vehicles pitch and yaw. Roll stabilization is provided hydrostatically, via the distribution of system components. CMUCams are used to locate the target light and beacon. These cameras are CMOS imaging sensors controlled by highspeed Scenix processors. The cameras allow for high speed color location functions over a standard serial bus, and thus can be controlled with microprocessors. Bearing to the ultrasonic beacon is determined with a TI C5510 DSP. The DSP provides a narrow bandwidth, softwareselectable digital lter, which is necessary as the frequency of the beacon is not known in advance. Additionally the DSP localizes the beacon based on the input of three hydrophones, and provides the system controller with a bearing.

Figure 1: The skeleton of the frame brackets. The frame is designed to have as many similar parts as possible, making construction fast using an end mill. The use of square channel means that mounting sensors and other devices to the frame becomes much simpler. We estimate a complete duplicate of the frame could be made in less than one days worth of work, due to the considerations taken towards simplicity and repeatability. A Minn Kota trolling motor and four submersible bilge pump motors are mounted to the frame for propulsion. The Minn Kota is placed in the center of the frame to avoid an uneven weight distribution. The four bilge pump motors are paired in groups of two, and mounted towards the extremities of the frame in order to increase their steering authority. The trolling motor is mounted facing forwards as the only means of forward thrust. The rst set of bilge pump motors are mounted facing laterally and provide yaw control. The second set of bilge pump motors are mounted vertically, providing pitch control. There are no motors to adjust roll, but the buoyancy of the frame is positioned to minimize roll. Buoyant parts of the assembly, such as the electronics dry box, are placed at the top of the frame, while

Frame
The frame Figure 1 is built using 1 extruded aluminum square channel and steel

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less buoyant parts, such as the batteries, are placed at the bottom. This creates a sort of dipole that will tend the frame to remain correctly oriented with no active propulsion.

third battery for a total of 24 amp-hours. The batteries are designed so that the individual cells can be removed for charging outside the air tight container.

Propulsion
The main thruster is a Minn Kota trolling motor rated at 30 lbs of thrust. It will draw in excess of 10 amperes current at 12 volts. It weighs approximately 7 lbs. In our tests, it could immediately stop a test frame it was mounted to by being put into full reverse. The smaller bilge pump thrusters were originally unmodied, and behaved much like a small turbine. Water was drawn from the bottom of the pump by an impeller and ejected at high speed from the side of the pump. When submersed, these pumps would draw 4.5 amperes at 12 volts. The thrust provided in this conguration was moderate. It was enough to drive a small test vehicle, but provided insignicant steering authority when used with the trolling motor. We then experimented with the pumps by disassembling the casing mounting RC boat propellers directly to the motor. Current draw remained at 4.5 amperes at 12 volts, but thrust increased signicantly. This conguration is used for all thrusters in the nal design. Power for the motors is provided by nickel-metal hydride battery packs. These are constructed in groups of ten cells in series to form a battery. These batteries are then placed in parallel in groups of two or three to provide the complete pack. This gives the motors a nominally 12 volt voltage source rated for 8 amp-hours per battery. When two batteries are used, this provides our design minimum of 16 amp-hours. If additional run time is required, we can add a

Vision System
Vision is provided by two CMUCam2s. Each CMUCam has an onboard processor that can provide basic image processing functions, such as color tracking and motion detection. By performing low-level image processing on the camera itself, we reduce the amount of image-related data that must be sent across the bus, meaning that a microcontroller becomes a suitable camera controller. One of the cameras is forward facing, and can report the size and location of the light in its frame with a frequency of 50Hz. This information can be used to determine bearing and a rough estimate of distance to the light. This is accomplished with one of the CMUCams functions, which provides the coordinates of a box containing all pixels of a certain color within the image. A downward-facing CMUCam provides tracking information for the target bins. This camera operates in a mode that provides line-by-line tracking information for pixels of a certain color. Both cameras are connected to an Atmel AVR via a TTL serial interface. The AVR polls the cameras and processes their data to provide the main processor with high-level guidance information.

Sonar System
Three hydrophones with built-in ampliers from Sensor Technologies Limited are

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mounted on the vehicles front and sides. These hydrophones are connected to a TI C5510 DSP which samples all three simultaneously at 300kHz. The DSP lters the signal from each hydrophone to the desired frequency and uses a correlation function to determine the phase dierence between the left and right hydrophones. This phase dierence is compared to a precomputed lookup table which denes the bearing for a given phase dierence. The sign of this bearing, or whether it is fore or aft of the vehicle, is determined based on the arrival time of the signal from the forward hydrophone. The output to the main controller is a bearing to the target.

has new information. SPI was used because of its native support by the processors we are connecting. Because it is a syncronous bus, connecting several dierent processors is simplied.

Navigation System
The navigation system is a series of control algorithms running on the system controller. Figure 2 shows a block diagram of these control algorithms. They control the direction and output power for each of the ve motors in the propulsion system to achieve its target. A 5-axis inertial measurement unit and a 30 PSI absolute pressure sensor are used as a feedback loop for the control system. Other software systems provide the navigation system with pitch, yaw, velocity, and depth targets, which are given to the various PID controllers in the system. Because we have no way to control roll directly, we monitor it and turn o the aspects of motion that induce a roll if the AUV tilts too far to one side.

System Controller
The main controller is a Motorola MC6332 mounted on a board called the Mini RoboMind, by Mark Castelluccio. This board includes 512k ram and a high speed ADC. The controller uses data from a Rotomotion IMU and a depth sensor to hold a constant pitch, bearing, and depth. On top of this attitude control system are the task-oriented behaviors. The rst task behavior moves the vehicle forward and keeps the light center frame in the forward camera. This behavior is inhibited when the downward-facing camera detects a target, at which point the vehicle centers itself over the bin and drops its markers. Once the markers are dropped, the vehicle drives toward the sonar beacon, and surfaces when the bearing to the beacon rapidly changes (indicating it was just passed). The main controller gets data from each of its subprocessors via an SPI bus. Each subproccessor is assigned an interrupt on the main processor which it triggers when it

Design Considerations
In order to successfully complete the contest course, a robot design must be prepared for several major obstacles. Firstly, the robot must be statically stable. This means that the robot should be able to hold its position at a certain depth and heading constant. Secondly, the robot must be dynamically stable. This means the robot should be able to move freely without losing control of its movements. Thirdly, the robot sensors should be robust enough to nd their target over a wide range of conditions. And nally, the entire control system should expect that

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Figure 2: Block diagram of navigation system none of the above goals are executed with any arbitrary precision. In order to make our robot statically stable, we considered several oating platform designs. These resembled o shore oil platforms that could also change their depth in the water. None of these designs would be very dynamically stable, and would have to be driven at low speeds. They also required many more motors than more traditional designs to control their movements. We deemed the ability to move underwater a more important goal that being absolutely statically stable, and therefore designed a test frame around the traditional torpedo layout. Our test frame gave us a better understanding of the dynamics of underwater vehicles. We rst realized that many frame elements added a large amount of drag and provided a frame strength much higher than we required. This led to our nal, minimalistic frame design. We also found that centering the vehicles weight inside its frame created a much more maneuverable robot. The robots sensors are robust in some ways, but not all. The hydrophones are almost perfectly omni directional, and are mounted wide enough on the frame to make detecting the acoustic pinger simple. The cameras, however, have a xed eld of view. By analyzing the course, we decided that the ability to pan and tilt the camera was not necessary on the downward facing camera, and actually added complexity for small gain. We chose to position the thrusters in a way that allowed the robot to translate laterally, since we expect this to be the most important axis when positioning the robot for dropping the markers.

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The forward looking camera may require some ability to move its eld of view, but we could not design a satisfactory underwater pan/tilt head for the robot. The robot compensates for this in its thruster conguration, which allows small pitch adjustments. Once we decided to use the main thrusters to aim the sensors, we realized the need for accurate position information. This is provided in the nal design with a inertial measurement unit. This device provides pitch, roll, tilt, and translational information accurate enough to hover small helicopters. The only limitation we have encountered so far has been accumulated errors when trying to use the device for absolute positioning. For small adjustments in position, it has proved apt. The nal aspect of our design has been robust control software. By correlating data between the visual sensors, the hydrophones, and the IMU, we can increase the perceived accuracy of the entire system. This allows us to play one groups of sensors o the other, and reject spurious information. This could also be done by building an internal model of the course and rejecting input that invalidates the model, but we have found that this type of control algorithm is too inexible for all but the most controlled environments. Instead, we use the world as its own model. Our software trusts the IMU rst, then the hydrophones, then the visual system. We use this order because of the inherent frequency of spurious results from each system.

mission requirements, we can rely entirely on low power, small microcontrollers. Additionally, keeping the mechanical construction simple ensures robustness and reduces the chances of a catastrophic failure. Most importantly, this modular system will for the foundation for UTDs future entries in the AUVSI underwater competition.

Conclusion
The UTD autonomous underwater vehicle is simple both mechanically and electronically. By designing a system tightly focused on the 2004 UTD AUV Team - 5