Arunav Dasgupta

Test-bed for Navigation and Control of a Thruster based AUV

A thruster controlled AUV is being developed for the Indian AUV project. All motions and control is carried out by a set of five thrusters for controlling positions in two attitudes and three linear directions. As a prototype and verification system for the above AUV, a test-bed to develop and validate the control schemes was found necessary and has been developed at IIT Kharagpur. This paper describes the design criteria of the test-bed and the methods used to develop control scheme for such class of underwater vehicles, which are wholly thruster controlled and can be implemented in this test-bed. The design and capabilities of such a test-bed has been considered for taking into account similar thruster actuated AUVs which may be used in conditions like low speed motion as well as high maneuverability, station keeping etc. Such vehicles are different from the hydroplane controlled vehicles which are more effective above a certain operational velocity. The test-bed proposed here is targeted to generate valuable experimental data for full thruster controlled underwater vehicles operating over a range of operational velocities including station keeping to cruising modes.

Robust Tracking Control of Underwater Vehicles using Time-Delay Control in Discrete-Time Domain

This paper discusses the application of time-delay control law for robust trajectory tracking control of underwater vehicles. The idea is based on the cancellation of uncertain dynamics in the plant by estimating a function which closely approximates the plant uncertainty at any given instant. This is done through the feedback of the derivative of the state and the previous control inputs. By deriving the controller in discrete-time the necessity of using state derivative is removed. The controller is computationally simple and easy to implement. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is demonstrated through simulations for various test conditions.