Development of the Pirajuba AUV

This work introduces the Pirajuba vehicle, an autonomous underwater vehicle that has been developed at the University of Sao Paulo. The paper describes its main systems, emphasizing hardware and software control architectures. The embedded system is low cost and based on off-the-shelf components, and on free and largely known software tools, like C language, and GNU compiler. Results of preliminary tests in a swimming pool are also presented, demonstrating the real-time operation of the AUV.