Development of the control architecture of an underwater cable tracker

Nowadays, the surveillance and inspection of underwater installations, such as power or telecommunication cables and pipelines, are carried out by trained operators who, from the surface, control a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) with cameras mounted over it. This is a tedious, time‐consuming, and expensive task, prone to errors mainly because of loss of attention or fatigue of the operator and also due to the typical low quality of seabed images. In this article, a reactive control architecture for visually guiding an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) to detect and track a cable, or pipeline, laid on the seabed is presented together with a set of experimental results. Such results were obtained by using a three‐dimensional simulation environment that incorporates the hydrodynamic model of a real underwater vehicle called GARBI. Additionally, a rapidly convergent off‐line tuning method based on evolutionary theory is proposed and discussed. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 20: 477–498, 2005.