Robust Adaptive Heading Control for a Ray-Type Hybrid Underwater Glider with Propellers

Abstract

This paper presents the modeling of a new ray-type hybrid underwater glider (RHUG) and an experimental approach used to robustly and adaptively control heading motion. The motions of the proposed RHUG are divided into vertical-plane motions and heading motion. Hydrodynamic coefficients in the vertical-plane dynamics are obtained using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method for various pitch angles. Due to the difficulty of obtaining accurate parameter values for the heading dynamics, a robust adaptive control algorithm was designed containing an adaptation law for the unknown parameters and robust action for minimizing environmental disturbances. For robust action against bounded disturbances, such as waves and ocean currents, sliding mode control was applied under the assumption that the bounds of the external disturbances are known. A direct adaptive algorithm for heading motion was applied in an experiment. Computer simulations of the proposed robust adaptive heading control are presented to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed control system in the presence of bounded disturbances. To verify the performance of the proposed controller for heading dynamics, several heading control experiments were conducted in a water tank and in the sea.