Autonomous docking control of visual-servo type underwater vehicle system aiming at underwater automatic charging

• Published in: Kikai Gakkai ronbunshū = Transactions of the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers Vol. 81; no. 832; p. 15-00391
• Main Authors: Akira YANOU, Shota OHNISHI, Shintaro ISHIYAMA, Mamoru MINAMI
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; Japanese
• Published: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers 01-01-2015
• Subjects: genetic algorithm; rov; underwater docking; underwater vehicle; visual servoing
• ISSN: 2187-9761
• DOI: 10.1299/transjsme.15-00391

A visual-servo type remotely operated vehicle (ROV) system with binocular wide-angle lens was developed to survey submarine resources, decontaminate radiation from mud in dam lake and so on. This paper explores the experiments on regulator performance and underwater docking of the robot system utilizing Genetic Algorithm (GA) for real-time recognition of the robot's relative position and posture through 3D marker. The visual servoing performances have been verified as follows; (1) The stability performances of the proposed regulator system have been evaluated by exerting abrupt distrubane force while the ROV is controlled by visual servoing. (2) The proposed system can track time-variant desired target position in x-axis (front-back direction of the robot). (3) The underwater docking can be completed by switching visual servoing and docking modes based on the error threshold, and by giving time-varying desired target position and orientation to the controller as a desired pose.