Development of an underwater robot, ODIN-III

During the last decade, the first autonomous underwater robot of the Autonomous Systems Laboratory of the University of Hawaii, ODIN (Omni-Directional Intelligent Navigator) built in 1991 has produced a lot of valuable results in development and control methods [(S.K. Choi et al., July 1994), (Choi, S.K. et al., March 1995), (S.K. Choi et al., April 1996), (Yang, K.C. et al., September 1999), (J. Yuh et al., 2000)]. Recently, ODIN was born again in the 3rd generation with unique features under recent technologies such as abundant system resources owing to a PC104+, new vehicle system software architectures with an object-oriented concept and its implementation, a graphical user interface and an independent algorithm module using a dynamic linking library (DLL) based on the Windows operating system. These give us an ideal environment for developing various algorithms which are needed for developing an advanced underwater robotic vehicle. This paper describes details of the development of ODIN-III and presents initial experimental results for fine motion control.