UTeM Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition Initiatives: Project TUAH and PANTHER

Abstract

This paper describes the development and lesson learned from the participation of PANTHER and TUAH AUV teams in the autonomous underwater vehicle competitions. The international competitions provide the participants with the opportunity to experience the engineering challenges during the development of the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) systems, and by demonstrating their working and engineered AUVs at swimming pool. A team with enthusiasts in underwater robotics was assembled in 2017, to venture into the competitions in 2017 and 2018. Till now, 4 teams have participated in the competition held in Malaysia and Singapore, and up to 4 prototypes of AUVs, called TUAH 1.0, TUAH 2.0, PANTHER and PANTHER-J, have been developed by the engineering lecturers and students in Universiti Teknikal Melaka. The teams use 3–6 thrusters that are configured for AUV control and the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) interfaced with control unit and powered by commercial LiPo battery packs. In general, various lessons in AUV’s navigation, localization, object recognition and manipulation had been learned from all competitions.