Development of ZEABUS 2018 AUV

Zeabus 2018, an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), has developed by undergraduate students from various departments in the Faculty of Engineering at Kasetsart University in order to join the RoboSub competition since 2014. The aims of developing the AUV are to efficiently control in all 6 degree-of-freedom, to accurately detect underwater objects, and to have quick and easy adaptation for various of competition tasks. Currently, the AUV has completed many tasks in the competition; however, there are several issues that require improvements. In the 2018 model, the AUV is maneuvered with 8 thrusters mounted at conscientious positions together with various sensors for navigation and control. Data are collected from these sensors and processed by two small-size computers inside the AUV. There are power and communication systems that were developed carefully so that the AUV can be operated accurately. Moreover, a software system was implemented thoroughly to control the AUV and to detect underwater objects. These elaborations make the Zeabus 2018 having higher efficiency and performance than the previous models.

I. Introduction

Since 2014 we have been developing an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to join the international RoboSub competition held in San Diego, CA. Though we completed many tasks, we found several issues such as weight penalty, maintenance, transportation difficulty, and computational performance. Therefore, in 2018, we developed a new AUV to deal with these problem.