Development of hovering type AUV “Cyclops” and its performance evaluation using image mosaicing

In this paper, a hovering-type autonomous underwater vehicle called Cyclops is introduced. Because of the symmetric body structure and thruster configuration of Cyclops, it is specially designed to utilize a lawnmower trajectory without changing its heading direction. This movement is effective at reducing the dead reckoning error and obtaining source images with homogeneous optical characteristics for underwater image mosaicing.