Underwater Robots - Gianluca Antonelli.pdf

10 1. Introduction
An example of cruise vehicle is ARIEL, belonging to the Naval Postgraduate
School; adetailed description and its command and control subsystems
are provided in [201]. In [145], the control system of the NPS AUV IIisgiven
together with experimental results. Control laws for cruise vehicles are
usually designed at anominal velocity since the vehicle is designed for exploration
or cable tracking missions, see, e.g., [41] for apipeline tracking
with Twin-Burger 2. The homing operation needs specific algorithms, [116]
presents experimental results performed with the vehicle Odyssey IIb, of an
homing system based onanelectromagnetic guidance rather than an acoustic
signal.
Research efforts have been devoted at controlling fully actuated underwater
vehicle, inparticular at very low velocity orperforming astation keeping
task. This topic will be discussed inChapter 3,some experimental results is
given in Chapter 5.
Identification ofthe dynamic parameters of underwater robotic structures
is avery challenging task due to the model characteristics, i.e., non-linear and
coupled dynamics, difficulty inobtaining effective data; the interested reader
can refer to [2, 62, 111, 271].
An emerging topic is also constituted bycontrol of platoon of AUVs, see,
e.g., the work of [27, 179, 276]. In Figure 1.6, apossible scenario of mine
countermeasure using aplatoon of AUVs under study atthe SACLANT Undersea
Research Center of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
is given.
In Figure 1.7, one of the AUVs developed at the Virginia Tech is shown,
these vehicles will be very small in size and cheap with most of the components
custom-engineered [132].
Abrief discussion on control of multi-AUVs is given in Chapter 9.
Fig. 1.7. One of the vehicles constituting the platoon of AUVs developed at the
Virginia Tech (courtesy of D. Stilwell)