A Cost Efficient Design for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Capable of Localizing and Navigating within a Bounded Body of Water

In this paper we present an autonomous control system, a cost effective autonomous underwater vehicle, and their integration capable of localizing and navigating relative to the boundaries of a bounded body of water. The vehicle is controlled by two propellers driven by Transmotec motors one on each lateral side of the vehicle. Two sensors are used to localize the vehicle; a compass and a laser based range finder. The range finder computes x and y distances from the vehicles relative to boundaries enclosing the body of water in which the vehicle is immersed. Given the current position, the origin and the target position, our navigation algorithm computes the required heading towards the target. We also show that this vehicle is capable of carrying out this autonomous control with a positioning error of about 0.2 cm and an orientation error of about 3.5 degrees.