LUV: The Low Cost Underwater Vehicle

Abstract

In recent years underwater robotics has become a major area of research owing to the development of many diverse technologies. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are used today for exploration, pipeline monitoring, military reconnaissance and other scientific tasks. AUVs can also be used effectively to teach principles in many disciplines of science ranging from physics to robotics. Any good robotics educational platform needs to be affordable so that it can be used by a variety of educational institutions and also be accessible to hobby roboticists in order to maximize the amount of research and development work carried out. This paper discusses the technologies and architecture used to develop such a low cost underwater vehicle.