Fin Actuated Autonomous Underwater Vehicle
National Science Foundation CAREER Award CMS-0238461 and UW Royalty Research Fund; collaboration with D. Dabiri
The multivehicle underwater testbed in the Nonlinear Dynamics and Control Lab consists of three fin-actuated untethered autonomous vehicles. The current vehicles are the second generation built in our lab. Each vehicle contains a microprocessor to collect sensor data, to handle communication with other vehicles, and to determine control commands to the servos. Each robot is equipped with an RC receiver. In small spaces such as the tank in our lab, or caves and littoral zones, noise in acoustic communication becomes prohibitive. In the case of our tank, RC communication has been demonstrated to be effective. Onboard programming can be used to allow the RC system to emulate the acoustic system.
The robots are each powered by four servos. Two are located in the rear of the robot and power the two links of the tail assembly. The other two servos control the motion of the forward fins; their motion is fully independent of one another. To be able to orient itself, the robot has a depth gauge (a pressure sensor) and a 3-D magnetic compass. The fish is tuned to be neutrally buoyant; that is, when placed at some depth, it will neither float nor sink. Due to pressure changes and compression/decompression resulting in volume changes of the vehicle, the buoyancy is not constant. A current device under development is a buoyancy tuner to adjust buoyancy as the robot moves to different depths.For purposes of development and testing, an instrumented tank has been built in the lab. The tank is an above-ground swimming pool 8ft deep, 8ft wide and 20ft long. Underwater cameras connected to an external computer provide the ability to track the vehicles in the water in real time. This data is processed for 3D position information and transmitted via RC broadcast to all vehicles in the tank. The broadcast information contains vehicle identification codes and can also include information for simulated vehicles to provide a group effectively much larger than the existing three vehicles.
Video Gallery
Videos of the first two prototypes in action are below. Movies are in wmv or avi format. If the video will not stream correctly, please right click and save the video to your computer.Robofish 1.0 & 2.0 (wmv)
- Robofish 2.0:Heading and Depth Control
- Robofish 2.0: Depth Control in the new indoor tank
- Robofish 1.0 & 2.0: Heading Control in the outdoor pool
- Robofish 1.0: Pectoral Dolphin movement in the outdoor pool.
If the wmv files above are not compatible with your operating system, there are some avi and mpg encoded raw footage files below: