A digital twin infrastructure for designing an underwater survey with a professional DPV

Abstract

This paper presents a digital twin infrastructure developed to study and test the buoyancy set-up of a diver propulsion vehicle (DPV) with and without payloads prior to the underwater survey. In order to obtain the final software simulator, MATLAB/Simulink (for physical and mathematical models) was connected with Unity (for robot and environment visualization and navigation). A user interface is also presented to simulate the model directly and guide the user in adding objects to the DPV and in running the code to recalculate the fundamental parameters of the model. The system was verified and validated through case studies designed to test the behavior of the virtual DPV.