Underwater pipe inspection task using visual servoing techniques

We present a visual servoing approach applied to the control of an autonomous underwater vehicle executing a pipe inspection task. After having briefly recalled the theoretical framework used, we design a closed loop control scheme using visual data as feedback. This scheme is analyzed using the facilities of our homemade Simparc simulation package which can handle both control and sensory aspects. The last part of the paper presents results obtained on, the Vortex underwater vehicle which is an experimental ROV built by the Ifremer company