Stabilizing Underwater Vehicle Motion Using Internal Rotors
Craig Woolsey and Naomi Ehrich Leonard
Automatica, Volume 38, No. 12, pp. 2053-2062,
2002.
As a case study of a particular control methodology and as a practical
contribution in the area of underwater vehicle control, we consider the
problem of stabilizing an underwater vehicle using internal rotors as
actuators. The control design method comprises three steps. The first
step involves shaping the kinetic energy of the conservative dynamics.
For the underwater vehicle, the control term from this step may be
interpreted as modifying the system inertia. In the second step, we
design feedback dissipation using a Lyapunov function constructed in the
first step. In the third step, we include a general model for the viscous
force and moment on the vehicle and we show that these effects enhance
stability. We first apply this method to a vehicle whose centers of
buoyancy and gravity coincide and then to a vehicle with noncoincident
centers of buoyancy and gravity.