COMMUNICATION SYSTEM FOR THE UNDERWATER PLATFORM POSEIBOT

The Mechatronics research group of Simon Bolivar University has been designing and building a robotics platform, a lab prototype, intended for rescue labors, recovery issues, and mainly for ship and underwater pipelines inspection. In order to facilitate the operability of the platform some kind of autonomy or, at least, wireless connection is required for the robot control. Radiofrequency is not suitable for underwater applications and a buoy had to be developed in order to communicate with operation and control central panel. From the buoy, a wireless access point connects the robot electronics with the control laptop through an Ethernet Serial converter. A video system consisting of an IP camera and software has been developed in order to have visual information from the robot work environment. A lightning system has been added to improve underwater visibility. All the software and control system of the platform was developed and adapted for the new communication tools using LabView (R). Data safety has been implemented using checksum verifications and the employed bandwidth has been optimized according to the signal boost. Some tests for the video system where developed and some image processing tasks were implemented in order to show the goodness and stability of the system. A multidisciplinary team has been working for several years to develop this robot.