Title: Obstacle avoidance system and wireless communication for an unmanned underwater vehicle for low depth water surfaces

Authors: Arockia Selvakumar Arockia Doss; Vivek Ghodeswar

Addresses: Design and Automation Research Group, School of Mechanical Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, 600127, India ' Tata Consultancy Services, Bangalore, Karnataka, India

Abstract: An underwater glider is a most commonly used unmanned underwater vehicle but it has limitations to avoid obstructions in its path. To overcome this problem, the application of obstacle avoiding system is needed. This paper describes the development of an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) with integration of sensor-actuator network to avoid obstacles. To study the hydrodynamic behaviour of the proposed UUV, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is carried out by considering pure surge and heave motion. The UUV is equipped with obstacle avoidance system with infra-red (IR) sensor and wireless communication module. Experimental tests are conducted to understand the behaviour of the UUV in low depth water surfaces and also to validate the CFD simulation results. The UUV's development, motion analyses and preliminary tests in obstacle avoidance are reported.

Keywords: underwater vehicle; computational fluid dynamics; CFD; motion study; thruster; IR sensor; sensor-actuator network.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAMECHS.2020.111300

International Journal of Advanced Mechatronic Systems, 2020 Vol.8 No.2/3, pp.50 - 56

Received: 27 Oct 2019
Accepted: 20 Apr 2020
Published online: 19 Nov 2020 *

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