A Novel Testbed For Experiments on Underwater Robotics

Abstract

The control system of a towing carriage was adapted for permitting variable speed control in both longitudinal and transversal directions. Using the automatic pursuing system aimed originally to experiments with free running ship models, and attaching underwater acoustic sensors to the carriage, a robotic system was achieved allowing automatic guidance in collision avoidance experiments. Such system can be used as a test bed for a preliminary debugging of real-time control programs of autonomous underwater vehicles, without the expenses of building, and using the actual vehicles. Another possible application include experiments on berthing systems for ships. First tests were concerned with the investigation of sonar mapping and collision avoidance tasks performed by a decentralized control system based on parallel distributed computing.