Development of an Operation Support Device for Portable Underwater Vehicles

This paper describes the development of a device for operational support of portable underwater vehicles during underwater tasks. In recent years, small, lightweight, and inexpensive underwater vehicles of many types have been released and used for monitoring, inspection, and educational purposes. However, the control of the vehicle position in three dimensions is difficult for untrained operators. To resolve that difficulty, we use haptic shared control for underwater vehicles. Haptic shared control realizes cooperative work of an operator and a control system through a single control device such as a steering wheel or joystick. For this work, we designed and developed a control device that enables three-dimensional position control of an underwater vehicle and presents forces for haptic guidance to an operator. Using this control device, we constructed the operation support device based on haptic shared control. Additionally, we conducted a preliminary experiment to evaluate the performance of the developed device. From the experimentally obtained results, we confirmed that the developed device is useful for manual control and haptic shared control for three-dimensional vehicle motion.