Design and Analysis of an Underwater Vehicle for Controlled Gliding
Joshua Graver, Jonathan Liu, Craig Woolsey, Naomi Ehrich Leonard
In Proceedings of the 1998 Conference on Information Sciences
and Systems, Princeton, NJ,
March 1998, p. 801-806.
Abstract
In this paper we describe the design and
preliminary analysis
of a small underwater vehicle built to demonstrate and test dynamics
and control of underwater gliding. Underwater gliding refers to
motion in which propulsion is provided by the force of gravity and
steering is maintained by controlling the location of the center of
gravity of the vehicle. Vehicles that perform underwater gliding
are expected to be useful as cost-effective platforms for ocean
sensing. Our experimental vehicle has an internal
two-degree-of-freedom sliding mass that is positioned via radio control.
The sliding mass will be used to switch between different glide
paths to move the vehicle as desired.
We show how to compute the desired location of the center of
gravity of an underwater vehicle (and thus the position of the
sliding mass of our test vehicle)
to produce desired glide motions and we investigate
the stability of these motions as a function of a center of gravity
parameter.
Back to home page