Visual Servoing Control of a Docking System for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV)

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are unmanned underwater vessels to investigate sea environments, oceanography and deep-sea resources autonomously. Docking systems are required to increase the capability of the AUVs to recharge the batteries and to transmit data in real time in underwater. This paper presents a visual servo control system for an AUV to dock into an underwater station with a camera. To make the visual servo control system , this paper derives an optical flow model of a camera mounted on an AUV, where a CCD camera is installed at the nose center of the AUV to monitor the docking condition. This paper combines the optical flow equation of the camera with the AUV's equation o...