Delphin2: an over actuated autonomous underwater vehicle for manoeuvring research

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Description/Abstract

The Delphin2 AUV has been designed and built at the University of Southampton, UK. The purpose of building the vehicle is to provide an experimental platform for developing new mission planning programs and low-level controllers and also for studying the hydrodynamics of AUVs.

The vehicle is over-actuated with; two vertical and two horizontal tunnel thrusters, a rear ducted propeller, and four independent control planes. The hull design is a scaled version of the hull used by Autosub6000, providing a low drag resistance against forward motion. The combination of the low drag hull and multiple actuators enable Delphin2 to perform hovering remotely operated vehicle (ROV) type precision manoeuvres as well as long-range survey type missions.

The control system for Delphin2 has been developed within the MATLAB/Simulink real-time environment, which handles the mission planning, low-level control and hardware interfacing. A description of the software, hardware and mechanical design of Delphin2 is presented in this paper.