Control of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles for Hydrobatics
The term hydrobatics refers to the agile maneuvering of underwater vehicles. Hydrobatic capabilities can enable exciting new use cases for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in aquacultures, inspections, under-ice sensing, docking, and manipulation. These ideas are being explored at KTH within the Swedish Maritime Robotics Centre (SMaRC). Modeling the flight dynamics of such AUVs at high angles of attack is a key challenge – we use Simulink to perform real-time simulations of hydrobatic maneuvers. Furthermore, these robots are underactuated systems, making it more difficult to obtain elegant control strategies – we can use the Nonlinear Model Predictive Control toolbox to generate optimal controls. Finally, the controllers and simulation models developed can be tightly linked to SMaRC’s AUVs and simulation environments through ROS.