Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Underwater Vehicles (UAUVs) with multiple propellers can operate in two distinct mediums, air and underwater, and the system modeling of the autonomous vehicles is a key issue to adapt to these different external environments. In this paper, only a single set of aerial rotors with switching propulsion abilities are designed as driving components, and then a compound multi-model method is investigated to achieve good performance of the cross-medium motion. Furthermore, some additional variables, such as water resistance, buoyancy and their corresponding moments are considered for the underwater case. In particular, a critical coefficient for air-to-water switching is presented to express these gradually changing additional variables in the cross-medium motion process. Finally, the sliding mode control method is used to reduce the altitude error and attitude error of the vehicles with external environmental disturbances. The proposed scheme is tested and the model is verified on the simulation platform.
Highlights
Autonomous unmanned systems are very popular all over the world due to their broad range of applications such as surveillance, inspection, fast delivery, search and rescue, among many others [1,2,3]
The rapid development of composite materials and the continuous upgrading of intelligent control technology have been of great help in the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) [4,5]
The unmanned aerial underwater vehicle (UAUV) has become a novel research field, which aims to design equipment that can fly in the air and navigate underwater
Summary
Autonomous unmanned systems are very popular all over the world due to their broad range of applications such as surveillance, inspection, fast delivery, search and rescue, among many others [1,2,3]. The work in [22] focused on the modeling and trajectory tracking control of a special class of air-underwater vehicles with full torque actuation and a single thrust force directed along the vehicle’s vertical axis. The environment in water and in air differs greatly, and the dynamical and kinematical characteristics differ greatly, and the modeling and control methods cannot be single and are more challenging due to their cross-medium application. (2) Mathematical models of the UAUV are deduced, the continuous dynamics are modeled by the Newton–Euler formalism, taking into account the effects of some additional variables, such as water resistance, buoyancy and their corresponding moments, normally neglected in aerial vehicles. A critical coefficient for air-to-water switching is presented to model the changed mass, force and moment in the cross-medium motion process. The dynamics can be deduced from the Formula (19) as: 0.5ksρwCdwSx|u|u]
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