The development of autonomous underwater vehicle´s semi-physical virtual reality system

A semi-physical virtual reality system applying to autonomous underwater vehicle control study is presented in this paper. This system is composed of three nodes: (1) autopilot node for mission planning and control, (2) virtual node for virtual devices and sensors and (3) visualization node for virtual ocean environment and display the state of AUV. The autopilot node can be both linked to the real sensors and actuators dealing with a real mission, and linked to the virtual world for simulation. The advantages of this semi-physical virtual reality system include that: (1) the vehicle software can he simulated in the laboratory before real experiments taking place, (2) the merit and demerit of some newly AUV system can be confirmed, (3) Moreover intensive testing is easy and its cost is not too expensive.