Design and Development of an Autonomous Underwater Helicopter for Ecological Observation of Coral Reefs

Real-time status monitoring is an important prerequisite for coral reef ecological protection. Existing equipment does not provide an ocean observation platform with adequate mobility and efficiency. This paper describes the design considerations of a proposed autonomous underwater helicopter (AUH) dedicated for ecological observation of coral reefs, including the system architecture, electronic devices, sensors and actuators, and explains the path control algorithm and controller to follow a specific path for ocean exploration. The structure and dynamic model of the AUH are first introduced, and then the corresponding simplification is made for motion analysis. Furthermore, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation is carried out to evaluate the dynamic performance of the AUH. Fuzzy-PID control algorithm is utilized to achieve a good antidisturbance effect. In order to validate the performance of the proposed underwater vehicle, a field test was performed, and results confirmed the feasibility of the proposed prototype.