Pipeline tracking for fully-actuated autonomous underwater vehicle using visual servo control

This paper describes a nonlinear image-based visual servo control algorithm for the pipeline tracking problem of a fully-actuated underwater vehicle. The dynamic model of a generic autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), incorporating all significant forces and torques is developed and a generic velocity control strategy is proposed. The desired velocities in the plane orthogonal to the direction of the pipeline along with the yaw velocity are derived from the image sequence using bi-normalised Plucker coordinates of the pipeline borders. The desired velocity along the pipeline is specified by the operator and finally the desired velocities in pitch and roll angles are set to zero. The asymptotic stability of the visual servo control strategy is proved and simulation testing is carried out to show performance of the control approach.