Development of AUV for SAUVC During COVID-19

This paper describes the design, implementation, and testing of control and vision algorithms for an AUV in virtual and real environments. Hardware design and the software stack of the vec6 underwater vehicle are described in this paper. The paper also presents a simulation test-bed, the uwv-simulator, which is developed using ROS and Gazebo. A custom arena similar to that used in the Singapore AUV Challenge is constructed in the simulation environment. One of the main motivations to develop the open-source simulation test-bed is to provide easy integration and testing of different cases and algorithms for autonomy. The software stack is designed to execute higher and abstract algorithms without the trouble of going through the lower-level functions.