Development of An Artificial Vision System For Underwater Vehicles

Proceedigns
Development of an Artificial Vision System for

Underwater Vehicles †
Cristian Méndez Sanmartín * and Moisés Bautista Briceño
Integrated Group for Engineering Research (GII), University of A Coruña, Campus de Esteiro, 15403 Ferrol, Spain
* Correspondence: cristian.mendez@udc.es; Tel.: +34-881-013-866
† Presented at the 2nd XoveTIC Conference, A Coruña, Spain, 5–6 September 2019.
Published: 22 July 2019
Abstract: Beyond certain depth there is no light, supposing the main obstacle in the use of optical
systems beneath the water. Therefore, the underwater vision system developed is composed of a set
of underwater lights which allow the system to work properly and the cameras. These are integrated
with the navigation system through the Robot Operating System (ROS) framework, which handles
the acquisition and processing of information to be used as support for the navigation and which is
also essential for its use in reconnaissance missions.
Keywords: Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV); autonomous navigation; artificial vision;

Robot Operating System (ROS)
1. Introduction
Marine activities have experienced a considerable increment in the last few years due to the
increasing energy demand in renewable energy resources, with offshore wind farms leading, and it
is expected to keep growing. Therefore, the number of offshore structures is rising, and they are
moving further from shore. The goal of these power plants is to get to the more constant offshore
winds leading to improvements in efficiency and the reduction of the impact in land [1] (pp. 47–48).
Nevertheless, this power plants must operate in harsh environments with very adverse weather
conditions so, regular inspection, maintenance and repair tasks (IMR) are required and they become
difficult, expensive and risky, and, above all, they are traditionally executed by professional divers.
Much research in the marine field is devoted to reducing the costs and minimizing the risks for the
workers in their tasks, in addition to overcoming certain physical limitations that preclude specific
human operations. However, the tendency is to go deeper in the ocean and some areas become
inaccessible for a diver. At the same time, underwater activities carried out by human require much
time due to the large extensions of seabed that that must be covered. In these scenarios, the efforts
are focused on reducing the costs and minimizing the risks for the workers on their tasks [2].
The logical path to follow in this field resides in the evolution from Remotely Operated Vehicles
(ROV) towards Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV). However, there are still some technical
challenges related to this conversion, such as underwater communications, power supply, autonomy,
autonomous navigation and localization, among others. Related to this field, the Integrated Group
for Engineering Research (GII) is taking steps towards constructing an AUV by carrying out
modifications over its own ROV. The current state of work includes tasks such as the integration of
the acoustic communications system and the robotic arm, the development of the data acquisition
and security system, the programming of the intelligence onboard and the development of the
artificial vision system, which is the theme addressed in this paper.
Proceedings 2019, 21, 1; doi:10.3390/proceedings2019021001 www.mdpi.com/journal/proceedings

Proceedings 2019, 21, 1 2 of 3
2. System Development
Due to the submarine does not have much space in its containers and in underwater
environments we have power limitations due to the battery capacity, the developing system must be
compact, low-power, accurate and accessible to be installed. Currently, this system is composed of a
Raspberry Pi 3, with an installed image of Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) Mate for ARM with ROS Kinetic
Kame, and a Low-Light HD USB Camera from Blue Robotics.
The mentioned Raspberry Pi assumes the role of being the data acquisition node and through
the ROS OpenCV camera driver [3] and using the cv_bridge package, we are able to deal with the
camera information and the images taken in OpenCV format in order to publish them in a topic with
the ROS image message format as it is seen at the Figure 1. This proceeding helps us to retrieve the
image from the ROS image message format and convert it to OpenCV format with any other device
used as subscriber, as long as it is being connected to the ROS network [4].
Figure 1. Cv_bridge package operation scheme for image information transfer.
The results obtained with the current hardware lead us to a publication rate of 15 messages per
second, which is enough due to underwater systems are quite slow, but it must be revised for future
implementations. The results of the vision system can be seen below in the Figure 2.
(a) (b)
Figure 2. Images taken with the vision system of the Kai submarine in the hydrodynamic test channel:
(a) Bottom of the ship model basin; (b) Process of cleaning up the ship model basin.
3. Challenges and Future Work

There is still much work in progress needed to be addressed. For instance, the first point we
must work on is the hardware replacement challenge. We need to use more powerful hardware to
manage dynamically more than one camera with better framerate and where we could run stereo
vision algorithms.
The second challenge and the most difficult is the development and implementation of a data
fusion algorithm with which we could combine the image obtained from the cameras and the image
provided through an image sonar.
Proceedings 2019, 21, 1 3 of 3
Finally, we need to run more tests in order to use this merged image to improve navigation in
order to be a little step closer towards an AUV and implement other functionalities such as artificial
recognition.
Funding: This research received no external funding.
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
References
1. OECD. The Ocean Economy in 2030; OECD: Paris, France, 2016; pp. 17–48; doi:10.1787/9789264251724-en.
2. López, F.; Ramos, H. A hybrid ROV/AUV vehicle for underwater inspection and maintenance of offshore
structures, in Maritime Transportation and Harvesting of Sea Resources. In the Proceedings of the 17th
International Congress of the Maritime Association of the Mediterranean (IMAM 2017), Lisbon, Portugal,
9–11 October 2017.
3. Cv_camera. Available online: http://wiki.ros.org/cv_camera (accessed on 12 September 2019).
4. ROS. Available online: https://www.ros.org/ (accessed on 12 September 2019).
© 2019 by the authors. Submitted for possible open access publication under the terms
and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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Proceedigns

Development of an Artificial Vision System for

Published: 22 July 2019

Keywords: Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV); autonomous navigation; artificial vision;

Proceedings 2019, 21, 1; doi:10.3390/proceedings2019021001 www.mdpi.com/journal/proceedings

Figure 1. Cv_bridge package operation scheme for image information transfer.

3. Challenges and Future Work

Funding: This research received no external funding.

Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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