Design, construction of a small unmanned underwater vehicle

Unmanned underwater vehicle have been long desired as sensing platforms for logistics and economic reasons. Most commercially available UUVs are expensive or have very limited capabilities. This paper describes the design idea of a small unmanned underwater vehicle (in short, SUUV) for some environment investigation, navigation, control, and target tracking experiments in the pool or lake, which is universal, portable and supports extensions to add heterogeneous capabilities. The SUUV is designed to be modular at the mechanical system and electronic system. Because of the light weight and small size, it has a wide range of activities and perfect mobility. We calculated the buoyancy and gravity of the SUUV to keep the SUUV stable. At last the simulation results based on ProE platform are illustrated that the SUUV meets the target design goals in expected aspects, such as vehicle body plan, pressure housing design, stability analysis, and electrical system design.