Sensors
CAMERAS
PERAL2013 uses four color cameras for visual recognition and navigation tasks. Two of them are located on the front of the vehicle, and the other two on the ventral area. They all utilize fixed focal length, and provide hardware H.264 encoding.
DEPTH GAUGE
The depth meter consists of a pressure sensor and a low-power microcontroller apt for fresh and marine waters. It provides real-time information on depth and temperature at which the submarine is. The system is autonomous and is connected by optical fiber to the Sensor Fusion System.
To obtain velocity, orientation and gravitational forces measurements, PERAL2013 is provided with seven STM32F3DISCOVERY boards with 3-axes accelerometers, 3-axes gyroscopes and 3-axes magnetometers. They provide real time information about attitude, heading, position, course of the submarine. The systems are autonomous and are connected via USB to the SFS (Sensor Fusion System).
INERTIAL NAVIGATION
PASSIVE SONNAR
The passive SONAR system consists of four Reson TC-4013-1 hydrophones that receive the signal sent by a pinger. This signal will be conditioned by an in-house-made PCB which consists of several filter stages and the amplification stage which varies the gain depending on the amplitude of the received signal, proportionally to the distance of the pinger. Then the 4 different signals go inside a STM32 DSP, by the GPIOs, so they can be transferred to the SFS (Sensor Fusion System), via SPI protocol, where all the arithmetic calculus is done to know direction where the pinger is.
