HippoCampusX – A Hydrobatic Open-source Micro AUV for Confined Environments

Abstract

Monitoring missions in confined underwater environments such as nuclear storage ponds or industry tanks call for highly maneuverable fully autonomous micro underwater robots. In this work, we target this challenging scenario with the new low-cost open-source HippoCampusX platform. We present a modular software and hardware architecture which is easily adaptable to mission specific requirements. Our system is part of the PX4-environment [1] and constitutes PX4's first underwater extension including a SITL simulation. We conduct a series of experiments to demonstrate HippoCampus' agile maneuvering capabilities and validate the derived dynamic model.