A semi-physical virtual simulation system for AUV

Just as Healey and Brutzman(1997) stated that "... a critical bottleneck exists in AUV design and development". Integrated simulator testing of AUV software and hardware is a broad and versatile method that supports rapid diagnosis and robust correction of system faults in the lab environment. So a semi-physical virtual simulation system for AUV is developed based on software developing platform-MultiGen Creator and Vega, and acts as an effective capable tool for long range training and intelligent behavioral operation for AUV. It is the objective of such design and development work to simulate a large-scale oceanic environment and to demonstrate a dynamic procedure of AUV under the control of the autonomous planning technology and the dynamic controlling technology. Some schemes about hardware topology architecture and software architecture of AUV simulation system are presented in the paper. Some mathematic models of AUV motion, the method of space consistency in visual simulation and data transfer mechanisms are also detailed introduced. All of above-mentioned forms a basis for integrating the intelligence technology and virtual simulation technology into the semi-physical simulation system. Finally, some real-time operational experiment results are presented at form of three-dimensional graphics, which is simulating the ocean exploration progress of AUV in virtual reality under the control of intelligence. The result shows that the simulation system is reasonable and reliable, that the mathematics model and simulation algorithm completely satisfy the real-time requirement, and that the simulation system can realistically demonstrate the simulation process of AUV. This semi-physical simulation system has been successfully applied to validate the correctness, validity and practicability for the autonomous planning algorithms and dynamic control algorithm of a certain AUV