Low Cost Assembly Design of Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV)

Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) drives underwater without requiring any real-time input from a human operator. These robotic vehicles are mostly used to explore the underwater world. These vehicles can be designed to perform underwater specific tasks like the exploration of the underwater world and spying etc. The readily available UUV's present in the market is of high cost ranging from 2000$ to 3000$. To reduce the production cost of a UUV, many pieces of research are in process worldwide. A lot of physics concepts have to be used while designing such vehicles. Image Processing is an essential feature of UUV based on which it performs underwater tasks. There are many constraints in performing underwater image processing as the turbidity of the water changes when one goes deep in the water. It mostly suffers scattering, limited range, low contrast and most importantly blur in the images that create problems for UUV to perform it's tasks efficiently. We propose a basic software, electrical and mechanical hardware design for UUV. PVC pipes were used for designing the structure of UUV, Raspberry pi acts as the processor of the UUV and bilge pumps act as propellers. Our design is much simpler than the readily available UUV's in the market. It is a low-cost UUV that performs specific tasks like goal post-detection, color detection and obstacle detection based on template matching. It is developed under 300$. One can add more features to a UUV to perform underwater photography and observation of marine life. The efficiency of the UUV system and battery life is enhanced for better functionality. A special waterproof container is being developed and attached to the UUV structure for waterproofing of the whole circuitry.