Intelligent Blowing Controller for Autonomous Underwater Flight Vehicle

Abstract

In case of flooding, the underwater flight vehicle (UFV) usually executes the emergency blowing by blowing ballast tanks off using high pressure air (HPA) while it also uses control planes and a propulsion unit to reduce the overshoot depth caused by a flooding and blowing sequence. However, the conventional whole HPA blow-off method lets the body on the surface after blowing despite a slight flooding. This results in the unnecessary mission failure or body exposure. Therefore, it is necessary to keep the body at the near surface by the blowing control while reducing the overshoot depth. To solve this problem, an intelligent blowing controller (IBC) using expert knowledge and the fuzzy basis function expansion (FBFE) is proposed here. To verify the performance of the proposed controller, the blowing control of UFV is performed. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm effectively solves the problems in the UFV blowing control system online.