Design of Automatic Underwater Object Detection and Tracking System for Penta Tubular ROV in Blue Economy Environment

Abstract

The development of underwater vehicles has opportunity to be further improved. One of the most challenging for developing underwater vehicle is developing automatic tracking system for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). This research develops AUV with automatic object detection and tracking systems. These systems are developed by using vision-based method. The AUV is designed with Penta Tubular type whereas the automatic object detection system is started from captured image taken by underwater camera in the form of Blue-Green-Red (BGR) color space, which then will go through a masking process. The object resulted by object detection system is then to be used as followed object for automatic tracking system. Meanwhile, Automatic object tracking system is established by using two vertical lines that are used as motion parameters of the AUV. By considering the object position compared with the two vertical lines, the automatic tracking guidance system can be generated. The developed automatic object detection and tracking systems can be used well for AUV, in which verage travel time for forward and backward motion are 14.20 seconds in 0.14 m/s, and 19.82 seconds in 0.1 m/s while average travel time is 15.36 seconds and 13.58 seconds for right and left motion test respectively.