Vision-based control for an AUV in a multi-robot undersea intervention task

Abstract

This paper presents a novel vision-based framework for controlling an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). In our application, this AUV is in charge of providing an alternative point of view of a predefined target during a multi-robot intervention mission, where two vehicles cooperate in order to perform the required task. Given this scenario, our framework is based on two main modules: on the one hand, a target detection and tracking module is used to determine the position of the target in the scene; on the other hand, a visual servoing module generates the required velocities for controlling the platform according to the estimated position of the target in the image plane. Results for a set of experiments in different environments are reported and discussed.