Hardware and software architecture for AUV based on low-cost sensors

The use of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) as robots for exploration and oceanology science has been a field of interest of several universities and research center's around the world in the last decade. Cuba being a country surrounded by the Caribbean Sea, having most of it's resources in it. Researchers from the Central University of Las Villas (UCLV) and the Hydrographic Research Center (HRC) have joined forces in the development of the HRC-AUV project, whit the objective of the implementation of a AUV capable to operate in the Cuban sea for exploration and supervision. The platform is based on low cost sensors and hardware. In the present document the hardware and software architectures of the AUV are presented. Also a set of experimental results are presented to validate the system.