HippoCampus: A micro underwater vehicle for swarm applications

Abstract

The HippoCampus platform is a low-cost micro autonomous underwater vehicle for swarm robotics research. This paper presents the hardware and software design, the communication link, instrumentation, and control system. The quadrotor design enables the vehicle to perform agile maneuvers in a very confined test tank. Vehicle navigation is based on the on-board sensor suite. Autonomous path following is presented and experimental results are evaluated.