Covering about two-thirds of the earth, the ocean is an enormous system that dominates processes on the Earth and has abundant living and nonliving resources, such as fish and subsea gas and oil. Therefore, it has a great effect on our lives on land, and the importance of the ocean for the future existence of all human beings cannot be overemphasized. However, we have not been able to explore the full depths of the ocean and do not fully understand the complex processes of the ocean. Having said that, underwater robots including remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have received much attention since they can be an effective tool to explore the ocean and efficiently utilize the ocean resources. This chapter focuses on design issues of underwater robots including major subsystems such as mechanical systems, power sources, actuators and sensors, computers and communications, software architecture, and manipulators while Chap. 51 covers modeling and control of underwater robots.
Preliminary experimental result of an AUV yShark2
Author Hyun-Taek Choi
Video ID : 799
This video shows preliminary experimental result of an underwater robot named yShark2 developed by KRISO (Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering). yShark is a test platform and is designed especially for testing the intelligent algorithms we are working on. For this, it has AHRS, IMU, DVL, two cameras, an LED light, a depth sensor, eight-channel ranging sonar as basic navigation sensors, and we can install an imaging sonar DIDSON for obtaining pictures as shown in Fig. 25.2. More importantly, its system software architecture is implemented using the structure explained in Fig. 25.7. The motion in this video is controlled by autonomous algorithms.