Simulation and control of an unmanned underwater vehicle

This paper presents activities in the field of underwater robotics carried out at the Naval Automation Institute of the Italian National Research Council. The ultimate goal is the development of an autonomous underwater vehicle for research purposes. A bottom-up approach has been adopted and efforts are focused on the automation of undersea tasks. A prototype vehicle called ROBY has been designed and a dynamic AUV simulator, known as ROBYSIM has been implemented. Brief considerations on ROBY's technical characteristics and software control architecture are followed by a description of ROBYSIM. Work performed on the control and sensor filtering modules of the architecture is subsequently reviewed. Finally, experimental tests are briefly described and experimental results are compared to the outcome of simulation.