ARTÍCULO
TITULO

Combined Depth Control Strategy for Low-Speed and Long-Range Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Anyuan Bi    
Fengye Zhao    
Xiantao Zhang and Tong Ge    

Resumen

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are increasingly being applied to highly detailed survey and inspection tasks over large ocean regions. These vehicles are required to have underwater hovering and low-speed cruising capabilities, and energy-saving property to enable long-range missions. To this end, a combined depth control strategy is proposed in which an on-off type variable ballast system (VBS) is adopted for satisfactory hovering or fast descending/ascending without propulsion to reach the designated cruising depth, whereas the bow and stern fins act as the actuator to maintain the cruising depth for more energy saving. A hierarchical architecture-based VBS controller, which comprises a ballast water mass planner and an on-off mass flowrate controller, is developed to assure good hovering performance of the on-off type VBS. Both numerical studies and basin tests are conducted on a middle-sized AUV to verify the feasibility and validity of this depth control strategy.

 Artículos similares

       
 
Zhu Wang, Junfeng Cheng and Hongtao Hu    
Port operations have been suffering from hybrid uncertainty, leading to various disruptions in efficiency and tenacity. However, these essential uncertain factors are often considered separately in literature during berth and quay crane assignments, lead... ver más

 
Yan Gao, Zixin Guo and Quan Yuan    
The mechanical response and deformation characteristics in calcareous sand foundations during pile driving and setup were studied using model tests combined with the technical methods of tactile pressure sensors and close-range photogrammetry. Different ... ver más

 
Yan Liang, Yu Chen, Zhou Meng, Xin Zhou and Yichi Zhang    
This paper proposes an underwater broadband target depth estimation method based on the multipath arrival structure in medium and short-range deep-sea environments. The proposed approach involves separating the multipath rays arriving at the vertical lin... ver más

 
Yang Zhang, Qiang Gui, Yuzheng Yang and Wei Li    
An efficient graphical acoustic computing (GRACO) method is introduced. Referring to the rendering of semi-transparent objects, the depth peeling (DP) technique is compounded with the GRACO method, forming a combined GRACO and DP method (GRACO?DP) to con... ver más

 
Lalit Kumar and Mohammad Saud Afzal    
The present study employs numerical simulations to investigate vertical wall abutment scour with different aspect ratios (B/L, where B is the abutment length in the flow direction, and L is the abutment length transverse to the flow direction) under the ... ver más