what is Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV)?

An autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is a robot which travels underwater without requiring input from an operator. AUVs constitute part of a larger group of undersea systems known as a classification that includes non-autonomous remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) controlled and powered from the surface by an operator/pilot via using remote control.

History=>The first AUV was developed at the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of
Washington as early as 1957 by Stan Murphy, Bob Francois and later on, Terry Ewart. The "Special Purpose Underwater Research Vehicle", or SPURV, was used to study diffusion, acoustic transmission, and submarine wakes.

Application
Until relatively recently, AUVs have been used for a limited number of tasks dictated by the technology available. With the development of more advanced processing capabilities and high yield power supplies, AUVs are now being used for more and more tasks with roles and missions constantly evolving. Dynamics and Control of AUV in a constrained environment poses great challenges to designers. This, coupled with the uncertainty of hydrodynamic parameters, make the controller design an extremely tough task. Classical linear controllers such as PID have been tried by many researchers for decoupled control of AUV in dive plane . However, the performance was found to be poor because of the non linearities and variations in hydrodynamic parameters. To improve the controlled system performance, control systems of AUVs need to have the capabilities of learning and adapting to the variations of the dynamics and hydrodynamics coefficients of vehicles

Control Strategies of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle(AUV).

A autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) dynamic model has often been decoupled to a certain multivariable system. where the assumptions like a linear model and small pitch angle are made. the AUV model is nonlinear and decoupled but the vehicle forward velocity assumed to be linear or constant. These assumptions are somewhat confining and could cause severe errors in many practical applications because of uncertainties of dynamic model. In this paper, the coupled, nonlinear dynamic model is taken for the analysis and, in addition, the above restricting conditions are eliminated by using suitable control strategies.

1.3: What are the method of non-linear control system?

Feedback linearization Lyapunov redesign Nonlinear damping Backstepping Sliding mode control

And Lyapunov based methods:

Use in backstepping method

In control theory, backstepping is a technique developed circa 1990 by Petar V. Kokotovic for designing stabilizing controls for a special class of nonlinear dynamical systems. These systems are built from subsystems that radiate out from an irreducible subsystem that can be stabilized using some other method. Because of this recursive structure, the designer can start the design process at the known-stable system and "back out" new controllers that progressively stabilize each outer subsystem. The process terminates when the final external control is reached. Hence, this process is known as backstepping . A brief discussion on the dynamic modelling of AUV is presented followed by a short summary of Lyapunov stability analysis and introduction to back stepping techniques. The controller design details are discussed and the simulation results are presented for a flat fish AUV. Finally the results are summarized.

2.1: Modelling of AUV Dynamics

The vehicle equations consist of the following elements: Kinematics: the geometric aspects of motion Rigid-body Dynamics: the vehicle inertia matrix Mechanics: forces and moments causing motion The dynamic motion of an AUV can be described in a common way through six degree of-freedom (DOF) nonlinear equations in the two coordinate frames as indicated in Fig.2 Maintaining the Integrity of the Specifications

2.2: Non-linear Control System Design

Proposed non-linear control system is designed by using traditional back steeping method. Backstepping is a design methodology for construction of feedback control law through a recursive construction of a control Lyapunov function (CLF). Nonlinear backstepping designs are strongly related to feedback linearization. However, it cancels all nonlinearities in the system by introducing non-linear elements in the input side; it shows that when applying back stepping design methodology the controller design is more flexible

2.3: Stability Analysis

The stability of relative equilibrium of the AUV control equations can be analysed using Lyapunov method.

A.Open - loop Stability Analysis

It is essential to ascertain the vehicles open-loop stability with regards to body fixed velocities. Consider a Lyapunov function candidate of some sort of pseudo energy.

The stability of the controlled system was tested using the Lyapunov method described in the previous section. Figure -3 shows the open loop stability response of the flat fish AUV. Here, the system is in an unstable state, mainly because of the positive buoyancy and body shape. Therefore, and the open-loop system is unstable. And the V value for open loop model is +56.7 >0. Figure 3 shows the stability response of the closed loop flat fish system. It clearly shows that closed loop system is stable. i.e

3.2: Simulation result

As the main objective of this work is to design a suitable nonlinear control solution for AUV, without considering any restricting assumptions, the proposed control law expressed in Eq. (8) was tested on a 6 dof nonlinear dynamic model of a flat fish AUV , which is under development at the Institute. The experimental vehicle is positive buoyant and the hydrodynamic parameters are experimentally determined. The vehicle was commanded with a surge velocity (u) and heave velocity (w) profile as shown in Fig. 4 for a predetermined path profile in 3D space, and the performance was measured for two different control strategies, namely conventional PD control and the proposed non linear control. The attitude of the AUV has taken care of inner loop which is integrated with the major control . For the performance comparison the conventional PID controller can be used. But in the PID control because of integral part chattering (oscillations) effect will be occurred in the controller /actuator signals. This effect is reducing the life time of the actuator and therefore PD control considered for performance comparis. Results of the simulation are shown in Fig.4 to Fig. 10. Fig 4 & 5 show simulated values of surge velocity (u) and heave velocity (w) for the conditions of PD control with restoring compensation, and the proposed control methodology. It can be seen that the surge velocity is reduced while heave velocity is increased by the controller to reduce the path tracking error as shown in Fig. 6 to 9. Also, it can be seen that the path error has almost become negligible with the proposed control strategy. This is due to the absence of linear compensation.

CONTRIBUTIONS
(A): STABILITY ANALYSIS The stability of relative equilibrium of the AUV control equations can be analysed using Lyapunov method.

(A:1):Closed- loop Stability Analysis

It is essential to ascertain the vehicles close-loop stability with regards to body fixed velocities. Consider a Lyapunov function candidate of some sort of pseudo energy. Ve=Vd ---------------------------------- (1.) Where Vd is reference velocity consider a Lyapunov function

V(Ve,t)=1/2 VeT Mve By differentiation with respect to time. = V eT M = VeT M( = VeT e ) -M

----------------------------------(2.)

{M

=VeT{-c(v)V-D(v)v-g()}
= VeT-Vec(v)v-VeD(V)v-VeTg() = VeT-Vec(v)Ve--Vec(V)Vd-VeD(V)V-Veg() = -(Vec(v)Vd+VeD(v)v+Veg())

If

0 , then the system is asymptotically stable

0 then the system is unstable.

Fig.10: Lyapunov closed loop Stability (Vdot) curve

CONTRIBUTIONS RESULTS
This paper presents a new nonlinear control strategy for controlling an AUV without considering any confining assumptions. The proposed control system is developed by Lyapunov based backstepping control method. Here in this paper a new strategy with open- loop feedback configuration has been proposed which have remarkable advantages over the closed-loop system. One of those advantages is the better stability response as dictated by fig.10.

CONCLUSIONS
This paper presents a new nonlinear control strategy for controlling an AUV without considering any confining assumptions. The proposed control system is developed by Lyapunov based backstepping control scheme. The control simulation results are presented. Simulation results show that the controller is quite efficient in reducing the performance error and system exhibits better stability characteristics for path control applications. Further work on analyzing the controller performance for various operational situations like external disturbance, sensor noise etc. is under progress.