Examination Committee

Prof Shaojie SHEN, ECE/HKUST (Chairperson)
Prof Zexiang LI, ECE/HKUST (Thesis Supervisor)
Prof Fu ZHANG, ECE/HKUST
Prof Kam Tim WOO, ECE/HKUST

Abstract

Underwater Vehicles or Underwater Robot technology has been investigated and improves in a past few decades.  Most of the research being done in the 20th centuries focused in mid-class underwater robot given a number of resources and technological limitations on that era.  Nowadays, observation class underwater robot comes popular especially to inspect shallow coral area as well as exploring unknown or dangerous places such as caves.  This thesis will presents methodology to design an autonomous micro-observational class vehicle that can maintain attitude and depth in the shallow water environment with all the disturbances.  A Prototype of an underwater vehicle will be used to test the attitude estimation and control to validate the proposed design methods.  Capabilities of the proposed architecture will be tested with a disturbance in abrupt acceleration and strong external magnetic fields.  In addition, underwater vehicle model will be considered to improve feedback control response and stability.