Unmanned vehicle systems are becoming increasingly prevalent on the land, in the sea, and in the air. Human-Computer interface design for these systems has a very important role in mission planning. The objective of this work is to design a unmanned sea vehicle and necessary software that can perform off-line path planning, vision management, communication, sensor control, and data management and monitoring of the unmanned sea vehicles

Batı, Samet

Karaçizmeli, Cengiz

Oğul, Hamdi Atacan

Tükel, Dilek

Samet Batı

Hamdi Atacan Oğul

Cengiz Karaçizmeli

Dilek Tükel

Crossref

Human-Computer Interface for Doğuş Unmanned Sea Vehicle

Dogus University Institutional Repository

____________________________________________________________ Samet Batı, Hamdi Atacan Oğul, Cengiz Karaçizmeli, Dilek (Bilgin) Tükel Engineering Faculty, Doğuş University, Istanbul, Turkey  e-mail:{2k35038,2k831007,2k836004,dtukel}@dogus.edu.tr Human-Computer Interface for  Doğuş Unmanned Sea Vehicle   Samet Batı, Hamdi Atacan Oğul, Cengiz Karaçizmeli and Dilek (Bilgin) Tükel              Abstract.   Unmanned vehicle systems are becoming increasingly prevalent on the land, in the sea, and in the air. Human-Computer interface design for these sys-tems has a very important role in mission planning. The objective of this work is to design a unmanned sea vehicle and necessary software that can perform off-line path planning, vision management, communication, sensor control, and data man-agement and monitoring of the unmanned sea vehicles.   1 Introduction  Sea power is a very important factor in military, commercial and transportation applications. There is a great interest in unmanned vehicles in the maritime do-main from military and research institutes.  The history of unmanned vehicles has its roots as far back as 425 BC [11].  The first self-flying robot bird  is propelled by compressed air.  Modern concepts were begun to be developed during the First and Second World Wars.  The first navy USVs were radio-controlled drone boats which was used for collecting radioactive water samples (1946) and performing mine clearance operations (1960s).  In 1985, the first modern USV “The Owl” was designed around the base of a jet-ski by International Robotic Systems Inc. In 1995, Navtec Inc was established and developed a fully autonomous navigation system using global positioning system and compasses along with a radar-based obstacle avoidance system.  The MK II [5] was the first USV to be deployed for a real world mission in 1995 in the Middle East. There are also many academic re-search projects involved in the development of USVs.  Several Catamaran type USVs have been developed such as SESAMO, an Italian catamaran USV [11]. In 2004, the Marine and Industrial Dynamic Analysis (MIDAS) Research Group at Plymouth University designed a twin-hull catamaran USV named Springer [7]. Springer research programme aimed to design and build a new advanced intelli-gent integrated navigation and autopilot (IINA) system.    Energy efficiency and use of renewable energy are very important for long mis-sions. Wave powered  USV “Wave Glider” has this ability and it crossed the Pa-cific Ocean, the longest distance ever attempted by a USV  in 2012 [11].  The Dogus Unmanned Sea Vehicle (Dogus-USV) project is funded by Dogus University with the goal of reconnaissance and surveillance of the Turkish coasts.  Being unmanned makes it possible for the vehicle to stay in the open sea for a long time without returning to base.  It uses solar energy and maneuvers into dif-ferent positions and paths using onboard cameras and global positioning system (GPS). As shown in Fig. 1, it is equipped with solar panels and batteries.  The specifications of the vehicle are given in table 1.  Fig. 1 Doğuş-USV trials on Aydos lake, 05, July, 2012   Table 1 The Specifications of  Dogus-USV Weight 256 kg Length/Width/Height 330/151/110 (cm) Power 5 HP Speed 16 knot Motor  Parsun F5ERL Motor Cooling Water Batteries Gel Battery Capacity 100 Ah per battery Number of Batteries 4 Solar Panels Lorentz LA-Series Solar Panel efficiency For 10 year 90%, for 20 year 80% Rudder Control DC motor Controller U1 Ultra PC-Intel Atom Z520 sin-gle core, 1.33 GHz Communication WiFi, GPS, RF, 3G Vehicle Controller Arduino Mega 2560   2 System Components  The Dogus-USV was constructed as a sea vehicle that could be either remotely controlled or autonomous. The team designed and built the boat starting with the body of a inflatable boat and modified it to fit an electric motor, propellers, U1 computer, microcontroller, sensors, cameras, batteries, and solar panels. The com-ponents are selected and constructed to perform long missions in harsh environ-ments without stopping or recharging. Dogus-USV is designed to be able to oper-ate in harsh sea conditions; it is equipped with sensors that can instantly report errors to the control center. The movement of the rudder is achieved via mechani-cal steering with a geared motor and a powered chain.   2.1 Motor Specifications  The vehicle is powered by a high efficiency brushless motor. Max power is 4.8 KW (over 6hp) but this motor is rated at 5 hp continuous. It has a high current pro-tection system [2]. The water-cooled version is preferred since the boat is de-signed to work over long ranges. It needs 100 amps of continuous current and a 10 second “power boost” of 140 amps for full speed. It needs a 48 V DC battery sys-tem. The inverter box is also water cooled. For the forward and reverse modes, re-lay based on-off control is applied. A servo motor is used for changing speed. There is also another relay that cuts the power using a different channel in case of an emergency. Standard props are used. We have installed and tested our system in a lake with great results.   2.2 Solar Panels  The boat can supply its own energy and completely refill its empty batteries in 7 hours from its solar panels (Fig. 1). The power supply consists of two solar panels of 130 W, four marine gel batteries of 100 Ah for 12 V each. The panels are high-ly efficient and durable against sea water. The panel surface is coated with a hy-drophobic layer. The dimensions of each solar panel is 669x1556x37mm and its weight is 16 kg [8].  Fig. 2 shows the electrical performance of solar panels.    Fig. 2 Solar Panel Electrical Performance[5]  2.3 Batteries  The marine gel type batteries selected can power the electric motor for up to 6 hours at top speed. Lead acid gel batteries are common choice for sea vehicles to prevent foaming. Four accumulators have been placed in Dogus-USV with care being taken to ensure they balance correctly. The characteristics of the batteries are shown in Fig. 3.       Fig. 3 Discharge curve 2.4 Rudder  The rudder is driven using a 214shown in Fig. 4 is mounted to measure  Fig. 4 Rudder mechanism an external encoder  2.5 Inverter  An inverter is a critical componentrecharge the batteries of marine type gel batteries [1] :1 gear head motor[4]. An external encoderthe position of the rudder  - ϕ 50mm-500 pulses/turn[3]. , performing voltage and DC/AC converwhich it can do in under 5 hours.  [3] sion to 2.6 Solar Panel Charge Controller Circuit  This is a waterproof circuit controlling the current flowing from the solar panels to the batteries.   3  Controller Hardware  A general system overview of unmanned surface vehicles is shown in Fig. 5. Three different controllers have been used in our system: a master computer, an onboard computer and a microprocessor based controller. The master computer in the base station runs the Windows 7 operating system; the onboard computer is a U1 computer with the Debian 6.0 Xfce Linux with kernel 2.6.38 operating system which communicates with the microcontroller and master computer. The micro-controller board gathers sensors information and sending it to the onboard com-puter and receives commands back via a 9600 bps software serial port. The master computer displays and monitors the current status of the vehicle. The connections between the computers are controlled by a trigger system which checks for discon-tinuities in the links.    Fig. 5 General System Overview The connection between master and onboard computers was implemented by sending and receiving commands over TCP/IP and UDP sockets. UDP packet con-tains GPS location and status information. The TCP socket can issue speed and di-rection commands.    4 Human-Computer Interface  The Human-Computer interface (HCI) design for Doğuş-USV (Fig. 6) aims to provide a user friendly environment for mission planning and monitoring.  The developed software tools should have the capability to provide operators of a mul-ti-vehicle, common control station with decision support for real-time re-tasking and re-planning of multiple assets and the ability to visualize data and infor-mation. The interface software for this system is implemented in the C# program-ming language, with communications developed in Java. It includes four main sections: • Vision management • Off-line planning and localization • Vehicle control • Monitoring and data acquisition   Fig. 6 Computer-Human interface main screen HCI provides the communication and visualization mechanism between the opera-tor and the navigation system on board. The operator uses this interface to receive video streams, as well as other data acquired onboard, and to define the route, giv-en as a set of locations which can be located with a geographical information sys-tem using a simple point-and-click interface. As part of the HCI, littoral maps of the Fenerbahçe and Marmara Sea were used in conjunction with an onboard global positioning system (GPS). A human operator can monitor the coordinates as longi-tude and latitude which aids the determination of a point for manual usage. The USV is commanded using a joystick. Some other tasks, such as motor on/off, are assigned to additional joystick buttons. For turning while maneuvering forward with a constant speed, the joystick’s slider property was used while the speed was fixed. The polling sets only one direction, backward or forward. The monitoring module was developed using DevExpress; adding a set of gauges and different kinds of indicators to the user interface. The speed, position and battery status of USV and motor temperature can be monitored. The design is flexible and it is very easy to add new properties. In addition to DevExpress gauge controls, progress bars are also used to monitor joystick polling. The interface provides video streams to the operator for monitoring the vehicle path. Following the route on a map makes it easier to visualize spatial coordinates.  4.1 Vision Management Two different Internet Protocol Cameras (IP Cam) are installed in the USV.  Each camera is built upon a 640 x 480 pixels resolution image sensor [2] with digital output.  The camera (Fig. 7) allows about 330 degrees of horizontal pan and about 70 degrees of tilt and has night vision capability supported by ten infrared illumi-nators built in. To stream these images, the video sub-library of AForge.NET[9] was used. AForge.NET is an open source C# framework designed for developers and researchers in the fields of Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence, image processing, neural networks, genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic, machine learning and robotics .       4.2 Offline Planning and Localization A map was used to see the real time position of Doğuş-USV by obtaining the co-ordinates from an onboard GPS. While moving the mouse, the user can see the longitude and latitude coordinates on the map, which helps with him for manual task planning mode. In addition to these properties the user can plan a path , draw-ing it in a similar manner to a painting program, sending the coordinates to the on-board computer. Drawing a path using a mouse clicks is easy and user friendly. The designed route can be simulated as shown in Fig. 8. In the figure, the small dots represent the user entry points. When the operator presses the “simulate but-ton”, the simulation starts and the D shaped circles appear which represent the USV positions.    Fig. 7 Night vision Ip Camera   Fig. 8 Doğuş-USV Path Simulation Navigation without obstacle avoidance, however, provides only limited capabili-ties in a real-world mission[7]. In order to reduce the reliance on operator over-sight, we will add an obstacle avoidance capability to our system in the next step of our project.  4.3 Vehicle Control A low level layer was run on the Arduino microcontroller and interfaced to the motors, sensors and GPS. It received commands via a serial port from the onboard computer which was running a Linux based operating system. Through this inter-face the onboard computer could send target positions and receive data from the sensors and status information.   4.3.1 Connection Through Master Computer to Arduino  The main mission of the onboard computer is managing the connection between the master computer and an Arduino microprocessor shown in Fig. 9 as a link bridge to receive and transmit for both sides. The application receives control data from the joystick via the master computer and sends it to the Arduino, and re-ceives data from the Arduino including GPS information, temperature and speed. This data is then sent to the master computer which than displays the status of Doğuş-USV to the user.  Fig. 9 Arduino Microcontroller BoardThe master computer cation was written in Java, and thecaused problems with cohesion.The solution was effiproblems. We tried to solvetransmitting the data.  An Arduino Mega was used to control sent the sensor data to the the onboard computer. sor data and transmit the control data. 4.4 Monitoring and Data Acquisition The onboard control and navigation subsystems are responacquisition and actuator control based on tasks uploaded to it from the base sttion. The communications wereta, commands and video streamsingle 1024 byte UDP The compression methodis  M-JPEG [2]. Motion JPEG (Mis separately compressed into aity is given to image res15 images (640 x 480 as a continuous flow of images over the 5 Conclusions  We have shown our approach of reconnaissance and surveillance.   application was written in C#, the onboard computer appl Arduino code was in a form of C++. This  The data flow itself was designed as a byte stream cient,  however transmission of the datasuffered from noise  the problems using by removing the noise  motors and gather sensor and GPS data. Itonboard computer, and it received the control data from The Mega’s 54 digital I/O pins are enough to receive se  sible for sensor data  implemented using Wi-Fi links which transmit d between the Doğuş-USV and the base station.  or 1024 byte TCP packet was sent at a rate of 5 Hz.   of the images captured by cameras mounted on the USV-JPEG) is a video codec where each video  JPEG image.  At low bandwidth availability, prioolution. The available camera can capture and compress, pixels resolution) per second, and then make them available  network to the base station. to building an unmanned sea vehicle with the goal  In July 2012, we tested our hardware and i-and re- n-a-a-A   frame r-basic software components. In the next stage, we will improve the path-planning and sensor integration parts of our project.  Acknowledgements.  The authors would like to thank Doğuş University for funding this project and Prof. Dr.  Elif Çepni and Prof. Dr. Mitat Uysal for their supports.    References  1. Battery, http://www.mutlu.com.tr/get_content.cfm?id=6 (accessed June, 2012) 2. Camera,http://www.chargerbuy.com/blog/files/2011/01/Foscam-FI8918W-Quick-Installation-User-Manual2.pdf (accessed June , 2012) 3. Electric Motor, http:www.parsunmarine.com/product.php?about=1&pzid=1&id=1  (accessed   June ,2012) 4. Encoder, http://www.opkon.com.tr/Urun_Detay.aspx?ID=62 (accessed June,2012) 5. Geared Motor, http://www.buehlermotor.de/C12572C600247071/vwContentByKey /W273RD58524WEBREN  (accessed June , 2012) 6. Owl MK II, https://www.wamiltons.com/project/index.php(accessed June,2012) 7. Springer: The Unmanned Surface Vehicle, Plymouth University, UK. www.springer-usv.com [accessed  June 2012] 8. Solarpanel,http://www.lorentz.de/en/support/download?docsearch=la170-24s& pgroup =la-series (accessed June , 2012) 9. Vision software, http://www.aforgenet.com (accessed February, 2012) 10. Larson,J., Bruch, M., Ebken, J. : Autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance for unmanned surface vehicles. In: Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 6230, pp. 623007 (2006)  11. Motwani, A :  A Survey of Uninhabited Surface Vehicles.  In MIDAS Technical Re-port: MIDAS.SMSE.2012.TR.001 (2012)   

Human - computer interface for Doğuş unmanned sea vehicle

Human - computer interface for Doğuş unmanned sea vehicle

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Crossref

Dogus University Institutional Repository