Visual Servo Control System for AUV Stabilization

The article describes a method for stabilizing an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) using a visual servo control system. A monocular video camera is placed on the bottom of AUV, which takes pictures of the seabed under the device. A special visual marker, represented by an ArUco(Augmented Reality University of Cordoba) marker, is pre-installed on the seabed. The proposed method makes it possible to stabilize the control object in the hover mode without calculating the 3D position of the AUV or the visual marker. The control action is calculated based on the position of the feature points of the visual mark on the image from the camera. Also, the control does not need to take into account the dynamic and kinematic features of the AUV. This makes it possible to apply the proposed method on a wide range of types of underwater vehicles. The analysis of the proposed control system using the AUV mathematical model in the CoppeliaSim modeling environment demonstrated its efficiency and effectiveness.