Our goal is to implement the control and vision for our Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, a robotic submarine which navigates without any human input. The vehicle must navigate a course which contains visual cues to help guide the robot.
Success will involve two separate sub-projects. First, we will implement high-level control routines. This means combining physical readings from all of the different sensors and determining the course of action for the robot. The robot has a variety of sensors including accelerometers, gyroscopes, a depth sensor, a compass, and cameras. Interpreting all of this information and making it useful will require an implementation of Kalman Filtering, PID control, and a state-machine. The state machine will contain high level instructions like “maintain heading”, and “pursue object.” The second sub-project is a set of computer vision routines. These will be implemented in OpenCV, and include segmenting objects from their surroundings, determining their orientation and distance, and distinguishing patterns. We have determined that 3 processed images per second is sufficient for our objectives, so we expect that a beagle board will have adequate computational power. The small size and low power consumption make them ideal for use in a closed system like a submarine. Battery power is limited, and a beagle board will consume less than one tenth the power of our current computer.
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