Design and Implementation of depth environmental simulator for hardware in the loop laboratory of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

The potential capabilities of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) compared to traditional tools and equipment have led to increased attention and use of underwater vehicles in various commercial, military, and research fields. The manufacture and development of an offshore operational platform require the design of a complete and expensive system of a maritime laboratory in order for evaluating and validating the characteristics and performance of the integrated system and its subsystems. Modeling can be a cost-effective tool for conducting tests, verifying and certifying components and performance of hardware and software, performing missions, and thus reducing potential errors in marine tests and missions. These goals can be achieved through a relatively accurate dynamic simulation and modeling of equipment and environmental conditions inside the hardware in the loop (HIL) laboratory. The purpose of this paper is to provide real-time modeling and implement a physics-based depth environmental simulator for an AUV to equip the HIL laboratory. Validation of the performance of the depth environmental simulator in the dynamic bed of six degrees of freedom of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle crawler has been done in real-time. The results indicate that the output of the depth environmental mechanism matches the measured depth of the field experiment at sea and there is no delay and bias between the real and simulated signal.