International Conference on Computer and Communication Engineering (ICCCE 2012), 3-5 July 2012, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

978-1-4673-0479-5/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE

Sonar Detection Amphibious Vehicle S. F. Toha1, ‘Abdul Mu’izz Ayub and Zakariya Zainol

Department of Mechatronics Engineering, International Islamic University Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia tsfauziah@iium.edu.my1

Abstract— Engineering Emergency management (pre-disaster occurrence) and first response information (post-disaster occurrence) are crucial during disaster attack as time is of the essence of life. The study on this field is vital especially in Malaysia, which located at the south-east Asia region, within the link of natural disaster area. This paper presents the conceptual design of an amphibious vehicle consisted of several features that will assist the savior in giving hands to help the victims of the disaster. The designed sonar detection amphibious vehicle is called SOPHIBIAN. A SOPHIBIAN vehicle is provided with Global Positioning System (GPS) as it will control manually form the central unit through wireless communication. The GPS will provide information regarding the current position of the vehicle. Camera also is used to assist the movement of the vehicle and also to detect for any moving objects or victims during the disaster. Obstacles avoidance will be one of the main factors of using the camera. For underwater operation, ultrasonic sensor will acts as sonar detector to detect any victims inside the water. The overall design prototype of the vehicle also very important as it can travel along muddy terrain.

Keywords: Sonar detection, disaster relief, global positioning system.

I. INTRODUCTION

This paper presents a low cost and intelligent sonar detection amphibious vehicle for disaster relief (SOPHIBIAN). It involves three major phases which are software programming, hardware construction, and communication setup. Software programming constitutes modeling the system in search for good model of the system as well as control motion of the vehicle in both land terrain and floating on water. Hardware construction will involve suitable design prototype and integration between all mechanical and electrical devices such as sonar acoustic (transmitter and receiver) and vision sensor. The vehicle is designed to be able to manoeuvre and suited on both land and water environments. Communication setup requires interaction between the amphibious vehicle with an external device such as global positioning device (GPS), personal computer (PC) or mobile hand phone..

II. LITERATURE REVIEW

Emergency management (pre-disaster occurrence) and first response information (post-disaster occurrence) are crucial during disaster attack as time is of the essence of life.

The study on this field is vital especially in Malaysia, which located at the south-east Asia region, within the link of natural disaster area. The north part of Malaysia had suffered from tsunami, one of the largest natural disasters of modern times in 2004, with 68 people died in Penang state [1]. Therefore, it is of prime important of this research to come out with an intelligent amphibious vehicle that can be used in both land and water to monitor and provide alerts in emergency management and glides through disaster area during post-disaster occurrence.

This paper aims to design and implement an intelligent sonar detection amphibious vehicle for disaster relief (SOPHIBIAN). It has the capability to manoeuvre intelligently with real-time control and obstacle avoidance capability on land, muddy places and in water. It is equipped with sonar detection features to detect objects inside water, which consist of collocated acoustic transmitter and receiver. The transmitter sends a brief energetic sound pulse into the water, the pulse propagates and reflects from objects in the water, and these echoes propagate back to the receiver. An energetic echo indicates the presence of the object, while the time of roundtrip propagation, from first transmission to the reception of the echo, indicates the distance (range) to the reflecting object [2]. The modelling and control design of the system are optimised using bee colony optimisation algorithm which provide an accurate and fast real-time control tuning response. Global positioning device (GPS) is included in hardware implementation to be used for terrain mapping and global tracking within disaster area. In this work, a thorough study of an amphibious vehicle design is conducted to enhance its amphibious capability by considering floatability, stability and resistance/propulsion characteristics and its performance during a water crossing operation [3].

Most of amphibious robot researches have been focused on biomimetic robots. Using legs, insect like amphibious moving mechanism [4-5] and snake [6-7] or fish [8-9] like mechanisms are representative. They have a great potential but in term of practical use, wheel or track based mechanism; conventional method is still a feasible solution for the mentioned amphibious vehicle [10]. An amphibious vehicle is able to traverse across different terrain such as land, muddy swamp, river and more. Images of disaster area obtained from an amphibious vehicle, due to the proximity, can often be more detailed compared to the images obtained from an aircraft [11]. Recently, lack of amphibious computer vision systems gives rise to the need of developing a system that is suitable for tracking objects from an amphibious

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vehicle system, which uses digital camera and is able to provide target guidance in real-time [12]. The autonomous system allows rescue mission to be carried out without the need of any onboard personnel, which reduces the risk faced by rescue team. The amphibious vehicle should also be designed to avoid obstacle such as rock, tree and holes so as not to dampen the rescue operation [13]. In short, the vehicle can complement the rescue team’s effort to identify the location of the victims and perform the rescue operation as soon as possible with lower risk and higher efficiency.

The hardware design of SOPHIBIAN vehicle is small and portable to manoeuvre into the disastrous and hazardous area. It can be controlled via GPS and has powerful function controller which makes exploration on any surface smoothly. This battery operated vehicle also has additional features of vision camera for disaster area investigation and disaster area mapping. A real-time communication capability also available for this vehicle in order to send required information from the disaster area to the main control plant. A control algorithm will be proposed to allow the amphibious vehicle to travel from its current location to another location specified with latitude and longitude coordinates.

To date, there is very little study of the area of amphibious vehicle where researchers are usually focused on either ‘on land obstacle detection vehicle’ or ‘underwater robot’. Much of the research in this field has been done abroad and most current research has been developed for military applications where all the data are protected and confidential. The future research aim, after the completion of this work is to add some other features such as scuba-based amphibious vehicle. It can also be used in defensive area to detect any explosive weapon or enhance surveillance mapping capability.

III. PROBLEM STATEMENTS

A natural disaster such as earthquake, tsunami and volcanic eruption, constantly leads to financial, environment and human losses. These natural events have occurred since the earth began forming and continue to cause serious damage and loss of life all over the globe. Developing countries are highly affected because they may lack resources, infrastructures and disaster-preparedness systems [14]. Following natural disaster attacks, there is often concern that the bodies of victim can cause epidemic amongst surviving populations [15]. Therefore, strategic planning and emergency management are vital to find proper solutions in dealing with both pre and post natural disaster attacks.

An amphibious vehicle, named SOPHIBIAN comes with the capability to manoeuvre on both land and floats in water. This vehicle has special sonar detector features to locate any objects in water or buried in soil. The portable and small size of the vehicle is an added advantage since it can move easily on the disastrous or hazardous area. Global positioning system (GPS) will be used for communication

purposes between the vehicle and plant controller with ease of camera vision system.

IV. CONCEPTUAL DESIGN

The overall system design as shown in Figure 1 gives a clear description on how the operation of this vehicle takes place. The ATmega 324P microcontroller is interfaced between the input peripherals and output peripherals.

Figure 1: Overall system design

In this work, there are four input peripherals used in order to move the vehicle. They are global positioning system (GPS), ultrasonic sensor, wireless camera and joystick controller. All the inputs will give their information to the microcontroller to be process. The processed data will be transferred to output peripherals through cable and wireless connector. Personal computer (PC) will act as a main control unit. In this PC, all the information regarding the vehicles and the conditions of the terrain will be display on the LCD monitor.

GPS will gives information of the location of the vehicle and also acknowledge the condition of the terrain. Ultrasonic sensor will measure the height of the ground below the water surface and also detects if there is any victim or not. Camera will guide the movement of the vehicle especially in order to avoiding any obstacles. Camera also will detect the victims on the ground.

Output peripherals will be a DC motor and servo motor and also the information display on the LCD monitor. The joystick controller will control the movement of the vehicle yet the output will the transfer to DC motor. DC motor will act as what information it gets from the controller; either to move forward, backward or turning. Servo motor will only lift up and put down the wheels depends on the condition of the terrain.

A. System design for DC motor The type of wheels that are selected for this work is

based on an army amphibian vehicle, which is using a chain wheel. Since one DC motor will operate each side of the wheels, some system need to be constructed for the

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movement of each side of the wheel. The problem comes when the car need to change its direction. In order to solve this problem, H-bridge is introduced.

Figure 2: Movement of the wheels in order to change direction

The schematic diagram as shown is the Figure 3 show that the direction of the motor is on the different direction. When the wheels rotate in a different direction, the movement of the vehicle will no longer in a straight line. Turning will be occur when this situation happen. This mechanism is very important since one motor will control one side of the vehicle.

Figure 3: Schematic Diagram of H-Bridge

B. System Design for ATmega 324P Microcontroller

Figure 4: The Block Diagram of ATmega 324P Microcontroller

The ATmega324P is a low-power CMOS 8-bit microcontroller based on the AVR enhanced RISC architecture. By executing powerful instructions in a single clock cycle, the ATmega164P/324P/644P achieves throughputs approaching 1 MIPS per MHz allowing the system designer to optimize power consumption versus processing speed. Below is the block diagram for this type of microcontroller:

V. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The retractable wheel was designed to reduce bow wave loss of wheels to enhance amphibious vehicle’s speed when sailing in water. In this chapter we will discuss the result regarding the retractable wheel design. The wheel will disturbed the water flow through it and create an unwanted pressure that will affect the SOPHIBIAN’s speed and stability. Based on Song Guixia and Zhao Youqun [16], when wheels are retracted, the protuberant wheels will engender attack angles, flow is influenced by the attack angles, not only changes the flow stability, but also has a block, so there appear high-pressure areas before wheels and low-pressure areas behind wheels, and produce a negative pressure. It corresponds to a low pressure hole, which reduce the water flow speed, induce flow whirlpool, and increase the bow wave loss. With the speed of water flow or sailing increasing, loss will be accretion. The SOPHIBIAN’s retractable wheel is based on slider crank concept and based on the calculation below, it only need one mobality to move the mechanism.

Figure 5: Slider Crank Mechanism

m = 3(n-1)-2j1-j2 (1) where, m is a mobility n is number of link J1 Number of j1 category of joints (Full joint) J2 Number of j2 category joints (Half joint)

Calculation: m = 3(n-1)-2j1-j2 = 3(4-1)-2(4)-0 = 1

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Figure 6: Main Chassis

Figure 6 shows the main chassis for the vehicle. A moving link/slider is chose as a variable link, which means this link will control the whole retractable wheel mechanism. The angle between bogies and connecting rod is fixed to make it more stable and reduce the number of joint. When it moves outwards, the wheels were deployed and if it moves inwards the wheels will retract. The difference stroke will give a different crank angle. The wheel retracts about seven centimeter and can be increase by increasing the length of crank.

A. Hull Design A hull shape will determined and affected the stability,

buoyancy, power load. Nowadays, most of boat design are using catamaran concept. Catamaran vessels are recognized to be very stable due to the large spacing between hulls yet very fuel efficient. The performance of a sailing catamaran is dependent on three main dimensions which are length, sail area and weight. Based on Terho Halme [17], it generally has no ballast; catamaran depends on beam and individual hull buoyancy for stability. The wider it is, the more stability. However a narrower hull is more easily depressed and prone to tripping in heavy seas. The wider body hull will gives a better load carrying ability, also gives more total stability but it will reduce the performance.

VI. CONCLUSIONS

The basic and conceptual design of an amphibious vehicle has been successfully achieved. SOPHIBIAN vehicle becomes very important nowadays because every day there are many natural disaster happen around the world. This scouting vehicle is one of the best to give a support to the savior in helping those victims especially on a very bad terrain such as muddy terrain and underwater.

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