A Low Cost Visual Positioning System for Small Scale Tracking Experiments on Underwater Vehicles

In this paper, a visual positioning system is presented for indicating the accurately measured location of the underwater vehicle at a low cost, supporting several tracking tasks. The system consists of a single camera, a novel quadrotor-like underwater vehicle (QUUV), and an onboard computer. By detecting the colored marker of the vehicle in the image coordinate, the actual location of the vehicle is obtained by a perspective correction based on the depths gathered by the pressure sensor. A self-made checker equipment is adopted to estimate the parameters for underwater calibration and provide the validation set for the accuracy of the proposed system. Besides, the efficacies are substantiated via experiments with the QUUV.