Heading and Pitch Regulation of Gliding Motion Based on Controllable Surfaces
Junzhi Yu, Zhengxing Wu, Jian Wang, Min Han Tan · 2022
This chapter proposes an attitude control method for the gliding underwater robot. In comparison with traditional underwater gliders, the robot’s flippers and fluke are controllable and thereby enrich the state-regulating modes of gliding motion. First, the regulating effect of the controllable fins on gliding motion is investigated by virtue of experimental data. On this basis, a heading control method is proposed, in which the heading direction is regulated by differential actions of the flippers. The framework of the control algorithm is composed of three main components: (1) A sliding mode observer is designed to deal with the difficulty in velocity sensing. (2) A heading control law is derived via the backstepping methodology. (3) A solver is designed to convert the controller’s instruction to deflection angles of the flippers, which can simultaneously eliminate some coupled but undesired movements. Based on a similar framework, a fluke-based control algorithm is also implemented for pitching regulation. Both simulations and experiments are performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.