Towards Software Based Optical Communication Methods for the Assistance of Docking Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

The use of optical communications systems is prevalent in underwater robotics when short-range data transmission is required or preferred. This paper proposes a method of producing and testing an optical communications system for use in the assistance of optical docking for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). It describes how the Simulink modelling environment was used to program and simulate a model of a transmitter, which was then implemented on a microcontroller. The transmitter model implemented on hardware was then used to produce an optical signal, which was sampled, logged and used to design a receiver model in Simulink. For signalling purposes, the experiment used a light-emitting diode (LED) with a driver circuit and photodiode based receiver. This simulated approach using real world data enabled the analysis of the system at every point during the process, allowing for a hardware in the loop style approach to be used in the receiver model design. Consequently, the Simulink Coder was used to produce the receiver model’s equivalent in C++ for later deployment. A benchmark was determined through experimentation to compare within future studies; the system was tested and found to operate effectively at distances between 1 m and 12 m in a controlled in air test environment.