Mercado Ravell, Diego Alberto (Universite de Technologie Compiegne), Maia, Marco Moreno (Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey), Diez, F.J. (Rutgers University)

Aerial-Underwater Systems, a New Paradigm in Unmanned Vehicles

Scheduled for presentation during the "Airspace Management and Control" (FrC1), Friday, June 16, 2017, 17:00−17:20, Salon E

2017 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, June 13-16, 2017, Miami Marriott Biscayne Bay, Miami, FL,

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on April 18, 2024

Abstract

Singularity-free modeling and control of Unmanned Aerial-Underwater Vehicles (UAUVs) are covered in this work. UAUVs are a special kind of unmanned vehicles capable of performing equally well in different mediums, and seamlessly transitioning between them. In particular, this work covers the modeling and attitude control of a special class of air-underwater vehicles with full torque actuation and a single thrust force directed upwards. A quaternion based representation is used to avoid singularities. A nonlinear quaternion feedback and a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) with compensation of the restoring forces are used to control the quaternion and altitude errors, respectively, while a gain scheduling handles the abrupt change in the medium density. The use of quaternions allows for the vehicle to follow any desired angular reference, which is critical underwater in order to efficiently overcome the vehicle’s buoyancy and drag. Numerical simulations are presented to validate the proposed control scheme.