Identification of hydrodynamic coefficients for underwater vehicles using laser line scanning and genetic algorithm

This paper presents a new method that applies laser line scanning to hydrodynamic coefficient identification for a self-developed autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The AUV positions/angles are calculated using laser images captured by an onboard camera, and a heuristic method is used to obtain an optimal combination of the hydrodynamic coefficients to be identified. In this paper, the AUV surge motion is considered, and a simulated experiment is conducted through OpenGL to obtain the surge-related hydrodynamic coefficients. Through the comparisons between the “actual”, “laser image based”, and “identified coefficient based” position datasets for the AUV surge motion, the feasibility of the proposed method is preliminarily validated.