Design And Development Of The ARM-based Unmanned Surface Vehicle For Ocean Environment Exploration

The technology of ocean environment exploration is an important component of the ocean environment resource development. And it is an important method to monitor the real-time environment information near the coast, detect resources and early warn and prevent the ocean disaster. And it has the great significant for the national economy and defense security. But the vehicle with man can't close to the poor environment marine area to explore the real-time ocean environment information. So in order to overcome the defect of the exploration vehicle with man, it is necessary to develop an intelligent ocean environment resource exploration unmanned surface vehicle.This paper research the design and development of ocean environment exploration unmanned surface vehicle system based on ARM. This vehicle based on the GPS and GPRS technology, and it equipped with the ocean environment exploration equipment such as speed sensor, depth sensor, temperature sensor, image sensor and so on. So it can monitor the real-time ocean environment information in the remote control center.This system is the hardware and software complex with the technology of the computer, electronic and communication. The hardware platform uses the ARM9 microprocessor. According to requirement of the software design, the software platform uses the embedded Linux operation system. This paper includes the following content: the compilation and transplant of the embedded Linux kernel and file system; the information acquisition of the GPS module, environment sensors and image module; the wireless communication based on the GPRS network and the improvement of the obstacle avoidance algorithm based on VFH (Vector Field Histogram).First, the paper analyzes the status and development trend of the ocean environment exploration unmanned surface vehicle. And it introduces the embedded system, ARM processor, principle of GPS and the network topology of GPRS. Then it gives the system architecture of the hardware and software. And it choices the hardware platform and designs the software system in details.In the software design, cross-compile environment is build, and the embedded Linux kernel and file system is compiled and transplanted. Then serial communication program is developed to gather and analyze the information. And in order to gather the image information, the image acquisition program based on V4L (Video For Linux) is developed after adding the camera drive in the embedded system. Then this paper gives the method to link the internet through the GPRS module, and it develops the network communication program base on socket to achieve the real-time communication from the vehicle to the remote monitor control centre.In addition, the vehicle must avoid obstacle in three dimension environment, this paper put sonar on different layers in the vehicle to get the three dimension information of the obstacle. And this paper presented an improved VFH algorithm to implement the real-time obstacle avoidance in three dimension environment. The simulation results demonstrate the feasibility and the validity of the algorithm proposed.Finally, this paper gives the experiment in the lake and the sea. And the experiment results demonstrate the feasibility of the system.