Design and development of an attitude control system for a human-sized ROV

In this paper, we present the design and development of an attitude control system for a human-sized ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) with a dual-manipulator system. The main operations of the ROV are sampling operations for biological researches, geological researches and archaeological explorations in Lake Biwa, the biggest lake in Japan. In order to achieve these operations, we propose an attitude control system and explain the availability of the proposed system in this paper. For the design of the attitude control system, simulation analysis was conducted. Based on the analysis, a pitch angle control system was designed and developed as the prototype of the attitude control system. An experiment was conducted in a test tank to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system. The result shows that the developed system is useful for pitch angle control of the ROV.