Abstract
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are unmanned, underwater vessels that are used to investigate sea environments in the study of oceanography. Docking systems are required to increase the capability of the AUVs, to recharge the batteries, and to transmit data in real time for specific underwater works, such as repented jobs at sea bed. This paper presents a visual :em control system used to dock an AUV into an underwater station. A camera mounted at the now center of the AUV is used to guide the AUV into dock. To create the visual servo control system, this paper derives an optical flow model of a camera, where the projected motions of the image plane are described with the rotational and translational velocities of the AUV. This paper combines the optical flow equation of the camera with the AUVs equation of motion, and deriver a state equation for the visual servo AUV. Further, this paper proposes a discrete-time MIMO controller, minimizing a cost function. The control inputs of the AUV are automatically generated with the projected target position on the CCD plane of the camera and with the AUVs motion. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the modeling and the control law of the visual servo AUV simulations on docking the AUV to a target station are performed with the 6-dof nonlinear equations of REMUS AUV and a CCD camera.