Development of Visual Servoing-Based Autonomous Docking Capabilities in a Heterogeneous Swarm of Marine Robots

This paper describes the design, development, and testing of both hardware and software for a visual servoing-based system that enables agents within a heterogeneous marine robotic swarm to share energy. The goal of this system is prolonging the active operational time of the swarm as a whole, allow...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied sciences Vol. 10; no. 20; p. 7124
Main Authors: Babic, Anja, Mandic, Filip, Miskovic, Nikola
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.10.2020
Subjects:
Acoustics
Algorithms
Autonomous underwater vehicles
Communication
Control algorithms
Cooperation
Design and construction
Energy
energy sharing
marine robotics
Modems
multi-vehicle system
Power
Remote submersibles
Robotics
Robots
Sensors
Servomechanisms
Software
Testing
Vehicles
visual servoing
Wireless networks
Croatia
ISSN:2076-3417, 2076-3417
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This paper describes the design, development, and testing of both hardware and software for a visual servoing-based system that enables agents within a heterogeneous marine robotic swarm to share energy. The goal of this system is prolonging the active operational time of the swarm as a whole, allowing it to perform long-term environmental monitoring and data collection missions. The implementation presented in the paper features an over-actuated autonomous surface platform docking up to four floating sensor nodes at a time and replenishing their batteries using wireless inductive charging. Mechanical solutions for each robot segment related to the docking procedure are presented, along with pertinent high-level and low-level control structures. A node featuring an extended Kalman filter and additional heuristics is used to fuse measurements from a neural network trained for object detection and a hue thresholding image processing algorithm, in order to track the docking target and achieve visual servoing. Finally, experimental results in both a controlled environment and challenging conditions on-site are presented. Once deployed, the developed system successfully enables the approach and docking of the designated target, showing its feasibility in different real-life conditions.
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ISSN:2076-3417
2076-3417
DOI:10.3390/app10207124