Stabilization and Coordination of Underwater Gliders
Pradeep Bhatta and Naomi Leonard
41st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control,
2002
An underwater glider is a buoyancy-driven, fixed-wing underwater
vehicle that redistributes internal mass to control attitude. We
examine the dynamics of a glider restricted to the vertical plane
and derive a feedback law that stabilizes steady glide paths. The
control law is physically motivated and with the appropriate
choice of output can be interpreted as providing input-output
feedback linearization. With this choice of output, we extend the
feedback linearization approach to design control laws to
coordinate the gliding motion of multiple underwater gliders.