A Portable Autonomous Underwater Vehicle With Multi-Thruster Propulsion: Design, Development, and Vision-Based Tracking Control

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) play a pivotal role in the exploration of marine resources. With the increasing complexity of underwater tasks, conventional torpedo-shaped AUVs exhibit significant limitations, particularly in complex and dynamic environments, due to restricted lateral translation and in-place rotation capabilities. To address these challenges, this letter introduces OpenAUV, a novel AUV design featuring a redundant multi-thruster configuration that enables full omnidirectional motion. The enhanced maneuverability significantly improves performance in underwater tracking tasks. Furthermore, OpenAUV's portability, cost-effectiveness, and open-source framework make it highly suitable for a wide range of scientific research applications. Comprehensive kinematics and dynamics models of OpenAUV are developed with hydrodynamic coefficients identified through computational fluid dynamics simulations. A vision-based tracking Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) play a pivotal role in the exploration of marine resources. With the increasing complexity of underwater tasks, conventional torpedo-shaped AUVs exhibit significant limitations, particularly in complex and dynamic environments, due to restricted lateral translation and in-place rotation capabilities. To address these challenges, this letter introduces OpenAUV, a novel AUV design featuring a redundant multi-thruster configuration that enables full omnidirectional motion. The enhanced maneuverability significantly improves performance in underwater tracking tasks. Furthermore, OpenAUV's portability, cost-effectiveness, and open-source framework make it highly suitable for a wide range of scientific research applications. Comprehensive kinematics and dynamics models of OpenAUV are developed with hydrodynamic coefficients identified through computational fluid dynamics simulations. A vision-based tracking control system is designed to facilitate accurate maneuvers. Extensive experimental tests are conducted in a laboratory pool, the results of which confirms the effectiveness of the proposed design.

I. Introduction

There has been an increasing demand for sustainable ocean resource exploitation over the past decade, accelerating the development of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) [1]. Traditional torpedo-shaped AUVs [2], designed for efficient straight-line movement, exhibit limitations in lateral maneuvers and slow-speed control, constraining their effectiveness in complex tasks. While enhancements such as variable wings [3] and counter-rotating blades [4] have improved performance in specific scenarios, they remain inadequate for high-mobility tasks.