International Journal of Control and Automation Vol. 11, No. 3 (2018), pp.105-116 http//dx.doi.org/10.14257/ijca.2018.11.3.10 ISSN: 2005-4297 IJCA Copyright © 2018 SERSC Australia Design of Aquatic Quadcopter with Hold Position Control and Gimbal Controller for capturing Underwater Video 1 Ronny Mardiyanto and Komang Trisma Trisuta Electrical Engineering Department, Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember ronny@elect-eng.its.ac.id Abstract The paper presents design of an aquatic quadcopter which have four driving forces enabling it to move upward, downward, forward, and backward for capturing underwater video. The system will be used for taking underwater video that usually can be performed by the diver. The current issue in aquatic quadcopter researchs is how the system can automatically maintain its roll, pitch, and depth position for producing smooth video. The existing systems still adopted the manual-mode control that only can operated by the expert operator. The proposal designs and realizes an aquatic quadcopter system having features such as hold position control and camera stabilization for capturing smooth underwater video. The system utilizes IMU sensor MPU 6050 and pressure sensor MS 5803 for measuring the position of the system (roll, pitch, yaw, and depth). The PID controller is used for maintaining the level as well as the depth of aquatic quadcopter. The Arduino Mega is used as main controller as well as sender of telemetry data to ground station. The experiment result shows that the system able to maintain the position automatically the average error of pitch is 1.53%, average error of roll is 1.37%, and average error of depth is 1 Cm. The realized system can be used for capturing the underwater video. Keywords: Aquatic quadcopter, Depth Hold, Underwater Videography, Remotely Underwater Operated Vehicle 1. Introduction Nowdays, the development of robot technology has been rising very rapidly. The robot has been succesfully implemented in many areas, one of them is unmanned vehicle. In more general, the robot has been popular to help human activities such as unmanned aerial vehicle for capturing aerial map, unmanned ground vehicle for disposal dangerous object, and underwater remotely operated vehicle for capturing underwater video. The paper discuss underwater ROV for capturing underwater video. The application of under ROV has been used in many purposes and field. The underwater ROV has been widely used for oil exploration, pipe installation, internet cable inspection, search and rescue application, etc. Nowdays, the use of underwater ROV for underwater works has more popular due to the economic reason and safety. The risk of involving human for underwater works is high due to many reason such as unindentity dangerous object in underwater circumstance, maximum depth for safe diving, license for diver, etc. It makes the cost for underwater works expensive (The cost for underwater works for one diver can reach USD 300 per hour). In 2014, there was plane crash (Air Asia QZ8501) in Java Sea. In order to search the Black Box, a lot of personels have been involved due to Java Sea has 320.000 Km 2 . One Received (November 31, 2017), Review Result (February 6, 2018), Accepted (February 14, 2018)