In the past decade, the design and manufacturing of intelligent multipurpose underwater
vehicles has increased significantly. In the wide range of studies conducted in this field, the
flexibility and autonomy of these devices with respect to their intended performance had
been widely investigated.
This work is related to the design and manufacturing of a small and lightweight
autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) with vision capabilities allowing detecting and
contouring obstacles.
It is indeed an exciting challenge to build a small and light submarine AUV, while making
tradeoffs between performance and minimum available space as well as energy
consumption. In fact, due to the ever-increasing in equipment complexity and performance,
designers of AUVs are facing the issues of limited size and energy consumption.
By using a pair of thrusters capable to rotate 360o on their axis and implementing a mass
shifter with a control loop inside the vehicle, this later can efficiently adapt its depth and
direction with minimal energy consumption. A prototype was fabricated and successfully
tested in real operating conditions (in both pool and ocean). It includes the design and
embedding of accurate custom multi-purpose sensors for multi-task operation as well as an
enhanced coordinated system between a high-speed processor and accustomed
electrical/mechanical parts of the vehicle, to allow automatic controlling its movements.
Furthermore, an efficient tracking system was implemented to automatically detect and
bypass obstacles. Then, fuzzy-based controllers were coupled to the main AUV processor
system to provide the best commands to safely get around obstacles with minimum energy
consumption. The fabricated prototype was able to work for a period of three hours with
object tracking options and five hours in a safe environment, at a speed of 0.6 m/s at a
depth of 8 m.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/35358 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Jebelli, Ali |
| Contributors | Yagoub, Mustapha C. E. |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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