Development of Navigation Method of Buoyant Boat for Maintaining Position of The Boat and Underwater Remotely Operated Vehicle

The paper discusses the navigation method of buoyant boat to assist communication between underwater Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) and ground station. The objective of the proposed method is to maintain the position of the buoyant boat at specific location while ROV dive in the water. The developed method has three modes: (1) manual mode, (2) waypoint mode, and (3) anchor mode. The waypoint and anchor modes utilize GPS for measuring the actual position. The manual mode only relies on user commands via remote controller. The waypoint mode is used for navigation of buoyant boat based on the stored waypoint locations. The anchor mode is used for maintaining buoyant boat to specific location while the ROV dive in the water. The method is implemented using Arduino Nano, GPS Ublox M8N, and HMC5883L of electronic compass. The proposed method has been tested in the lake eight of Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember Surabaya. The Buoyant Boat can be driven in all directions according to user commands via manual mode. It also can passed through three stored points in waypoint mode. Moreover, the anchor mode success to maintain the boat location to specific location while it was operated using anchor mode with maximum error of 2 meters.