Underwater recovery realization for an AUV using positioning-to-line strategy

The underwater recovery problem between an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) and a static open-shelf docking station was addressed in this paper. In order to implement this type of recovery method, a positioning-to-line (PTL) strategy was proposed. Based on this strategy, three subsystems were designed to guarantee the position and attitude of the vehicle change to expected ones. In addition, acoustic and vision guided algorithms were adopted to provide position information as the vehicle approached to the docking station. A water tank experiment was designed to evaluate the performance of the proposed strategy. Experimental results carried out in a water tank demonstrated that the proposed PTL strategy was effective to autonomously realize underwater recovery with the assigned docking station.