Haptic driving system for surge motion control of underwater remotely operated vehicles

This paper presents the development of a haptic driving system for underwater Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs). Unlike conventional ROV driving systems, which only transmit commands from the pilots to the vehicle controller, the proposed haptic device has the ability to provide information about the working environment back to the operator via tactile sensing. In this paper, the drag force generated by the fluid interaction is chosen as the feedback objective for the haptic control. Hence, the haptic device helps the operator to sense the drag force via feedback through the joystick. A one degree of freedom (1-DOF) haptic joystick was developed to first control the surge motion of a simulated ROV model, with future work aimed at evaluation on an actual vehicle. The results of the haptic controller linked to the simulation model proved the feedback ability of the controller and identified areas of improvement, especially with regard to noise filtering.