Application of a robust adaptive controller to autonomous diving FP control of an UAV

This paper presents a neural network adaptive control scheme for the nonlinear systems in strict-feedback form, where the unstructured uncertainties are assumed to be unknown, though they still satisfy certain growth conditions characterized by 'bounding functions' composed of known functions multiplied by unknown constants. All adaptation laws for these unknown bounds are derived from Lyapunov based method as well as the adaptation laws for the networks' weights estimations. In addition, the unknown control gain functions are not approximated directly by neural networks. Therefore, we can avoid the possible controller singularity problems. Under a certain relaxed assumptions on the control gain functions, proposed control scheme can guarantee that all the signals in the closed-loop system are uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB). Simulation studies are included to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, and some practical features of the control laws are also discussed.

In this chapter, the receding horizon Kalman filter is applied to underwater navigation systems. The ocean covers about two-thirds of the earth and has a great effect on human beings. However, the ocean is overlooked while we focus our attention on land and atmospheric issues; we have not been able to explore the full depths of the ocean, its abundant livings and non-living resources. For example, only recently we have discovered, by using manned submersibles, that a large amount of methane and carbon dioxide comes from the seafloor and extraordinary groups of organisms live in hydrothermal vent areas. However, a number of complex issues due to the unstructured and hazardous undersea environment make it difficult to survey in the ocean even though today’s technologies have allowed humans to land on the moon and robots to travel to Mars. Unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) can help us better understand marine and other environmental issues, protect the ocean resources of the earth from pollution, and efficiently utilize them for human welfare. The UUV is a platform for a variety of sensors: acoustic, magnetic, gravimetric and chemical ones. Most commercial UUVs are tethered and remotely operated, referred to as remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). Extensive use of manned submersibles and ROVs are currently limited to a few applications because of very high operational costs, operator fatigue and safety issues. The demand for advanced underwater vehicle technologies is growing and will eventually lead to fully autonomous and reliable underwater vehicles. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) were initially developed to perform missions that were not easy for ROVs and manned underwater vehicles. Since the autonomy allows AUVs to be used for risky missions such as a mine countermeasure (MCM) or under-ice operations, AUVs are replacing ROVs towed vehicles as well as manned underwater vehicles (Whitcomb, 2000). For detailed ocean surveys, an AUV acts as a more stable platform for precision sensors than ROVs or towed vehicles because an AUV is not subject to physical disturbances transmitted along the cable to the surface vessel. This absence of physical attachment also allows AUVs to measure ocean characteristics at specific depths and perform bottom-following missions as owing to its autonomy. In short, An AUV provides marine researchers with a new form of access to deeper ocean. For an AUV to successfully complete a typical survey mission, it must follow a path specified by the operator as closely as possible and arrive at a precise location for collecting data. When an AUV is not able to follow the path accurately during the mission, critical Source: Kalman Filter, Book edited by: Vedran Kordic, ISBN 978-953-307-094-0, pp. 390, May 2010, INTECH, Croatia, downloaded from SCIYO.COM

Unmanned, underwater vehicles have been developed considerably in recent years. Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are increasingly used for routine inspection and maintenance tasks but have a range that is limited by the umbilical cable. For long range operations, such as oceanographic exploration and surveying, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are emerging which haveon-board power and are equipped with advanced control capabilities to carry out tasks with the minimum of human intervention. AUVs typically resemble torpedoes in that mosthave control surfaces and a single propulsion unit, and must move forwards to manoeuvre. Such vehicles are called flight vehicles. This paper describes techniques which are candidates for control of a flight AUV and identifies controllers used on some existing vehicles. Since underwater vehicle dynamics are nonlinear, fuzzy logic and sliding mode control were felt to have promise for autopilot application due to their potential robustness. Following development using a comprehensive simulation programme, the controllers were tested using the experimental vehicle, Subzero II, and their performance compared with that of a classical linear controller. The relative merits of the methods for practical implementation are discussed.

This paper deals with the control of underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). AUVs are needed in many applications such as the exploration of oceans, scientific and military missions, etc. There are many challenges in the control of AUVs due to the complexity of the AUV model, the unmodelled dynamics, the uncertainties and the environmental disturbances. A trajectory tracking control scheme is proposed in this paper; this control scheme is designed using the sliding mode control technique in order to be robust against bounded disturbances. The control performance of an example AUV, using the proposed method, is evaluated through computer simulations. These simulation studies, which consider different reference trajectories, show that the proposed control scheme is robust under bounded disturbances.

The problem of designing an accurate and reliable control for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), which is being subjected to environmental disturbances as well as configuration related changes, is critical in order to accomplish a successful mission. Any real-world problem solving system must deal with the issue of uncertainty, since the system's knowledge of the world is always incomplete, imprecise, and uncertain. This situation is aggravated for an AUV, due to the complex oceanic environment, and the inevitable noise of the sensory system. Some major facts that contribute to the difficulty of the underwater vehicle control are: • the dynamic behavior of the vehicle is highly nonlinear, • hydrodynamic coefficients cannot be easily obtained, hence making up uncertainties in the model knowledge, • the vehicle main body can be disturbed due to the ocean currents and vehicle motion. Therefore, it is difficult to obtain high performance by using the conventional control strategies. The control system should be able to learn and adapt itself to the changes in the dynamics of the vehicle and its environment. Many control methods have been proposed by researchers during the last decade, and there still exists a trend towards finding a better control law to achieve exponential stability while accounting for environmental changes and vehicle uncertainties. Focusing on the low level motion control of AUVs, most of the proposed control schemes take into account the uncertainty in the model by resorting to an adaptive strategy ((Corradini & Orlando, 1997), (Fossen & Sagatun, 1991a) and (Narasimhan & Singh, 2006)), or a robust approach ((Marco & Healey, 2001) and (Healey & Lienard, 1993)). In (Healey & Lienard, 1993) an estimation of the dynamic parameters of the vehicle NPS AUV Phoenix is also provided. Other relevant works on the adaptive and robust control of underwater vehicles are (Cristi & Healey, 1989), and (Cristi et al., 1990). (Leonard & Krishnaprasad, 1994) considers the control of an AUV in the event of an actuator failure. Experimental results on underwater vehicle control have been addressed by many researchers (e.g. see (Antonelli et al., 1999), (Antonelli et al., 2001), and (Zhao & Yuh, 2005)). An overview of control techniques for AUVs is reported in (Fossen, 1994). The aim of this chapter is to design a control system that would achieve perfect tracking for all configuration variables (e.g. sway and yaw motions) for any desired trajectory. To this end, we present the application of nonlinear control methods to an AUV that would lead to O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w .in te ch w eb .o rg

Non-parametric system identification with Gaussian Processes for underwater vehicles is explored in this research with the purpose of modelling autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) dynamics with low amount of data. Multi-output Gaussian processes and its aptitude to model the dynamic system of an underactuated AUV without losing the relationships between tied outputs is used. The simulation of a first-principles model of a Remus 100 AUV is employed to capture data for the training and validation of the multi-output Gaussian processes. The metric and required procedure to carry out multi-output Gaussian processes for AUV with 6 degrees of freedom (DoF) is also shown in this paper. Multi-output Gaussian processes are compared with the popular technique of recurrent neural network show that Multi-output Gaussian processes manage to surpass RNN for non-parametric dynamic system identification in underwater vehicles with highly coupled DoF with the added benefit of providing a measurement of confidence.

A practical design method is developed for path following and coordinated control of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). Each AUV is modeled by a system with time-varying parameters, unknown nonlinear dynamics and unknown disturbance. A robust adaptive distributed controller is designed for each AUV such that all AUVs ultimately synchronize to the desired paths with required formation. Moreover, these controllers are distributed in the sense that the controller design for each AUV only requires relative state in formation between itself and its neighbors. Finally, a simulation example demonstrates the effectiveness of the control method.

This article discusses a challenge of the hydrodynamic coefficient identification in autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The considered coefficients correspond to a nonlinear mathematical model of an AUV maneuvering in the horizontal plane. The dynamics of underwater vehicles is intrinsically nonlinear. Hence, to reproduce different types of maneuvers, such as straight line, zigzag, or turning in circles, a nonlinear mathematical model is important. The proposed identification approach combines an analytical and semiempirical estimation method (ASE), based on the hydrodynamics and geometric characteristics of submarine vehicles, with a parameter estimator based on the extended Kalman filter. The identification starts with ASE estimations, and then the estimator based on the extended Kalman filter adjusts the hydrodynamic coefficient estimates based on the experimental data. The experimental data were obtained with the sensors of the Pirajuba AUV during sea trials. This identification method is a cyclical estimation process, where the less reliable parameters are adjusted to the experimental data while the most reliable parameters are kept fixed. Therefore, in the next identification iteration, the originally fixed model parameters are adjusted to the experimental data, keeping the already identified values. Finally, the identified model is used to simulate the vehicle's movement, and the movement variables are compared to the experimental data, thus validating the identified model.

A tethered flight vehicle such as Subzero III can be a reliable test-bed for AUV control techniques provided that the tether effects be removed by feed-forward control. To achieve the composite control idea, a numerical scheme for prediction of tether effects has been proposed and assessed. We argue that the composite control scheme can also be applied to the control of an ROV during the deployment of the umbilical. The H∞ approach has been applied to the design of the autopilots for autonomous underwater vehicles. The autopilots developed have the following features: (1) they have simpler structures than conventional H∞ design and the performance degrada tion caused by the controller order reduction is negligible; (2) rate feedback is applied for heading and depth control to improve tracking performance; (3) the overshoot specification is considered in the design by choosing suitable weighting functions. The results of both nonlinear simulations and water trials in two different tanks show that the autopilots are robust to model uncertainty, external disturbances and varying dynamics of the vehicle and exhibit good tracking performance. Thus the effectiveness of robust control for AUVs appears promising.

This article presents a design method for the three-dimensional trajectory tracking control of an underactuated autonomous underwater vehicle with unknown current disturbances. To simplify the complexity of the controller and avoid the singular problem induced by initial state constraints, a novel nonlinear backstepping technique based on virtual control variables is employed to design the kinematics and dynamics controllers. The control law is developed by building virtual errors, which can solve the problem of differential explosion in the traditional backstepping. Specifically, an ocean current observer based on the kinematics model is proposed to estimate unknown current disturbances, where the estimation is integrated into the autonomous underwater vehicle kinematics and dynamics equations. The convergence of tracking errors and system stability are proven by using Lyapunov stable theory. Finally, the simulation studies were provided to illustrate the effectiveness and good performance of the above trajectory tracking strategy.

Models of the open‐loop dynamics for prototype Remotely Operated Underwater Vehicles (ROVs) and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are required for performance prediction and autopilot design. This article describes techniques which can be used to derive these models. The methods may be conveniently grouped into predictive techniques i.e., those which require only vehicle design data and which predict dynamics before the prototype is built and testing techniques i.e., methods which measure open‐loop dynamics from the trials performance of a prototype ROV. The relative benefits and drawbacks of the various methods are examined.

Describes applications of fuzzy logic to the control of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). One application described here is a fuzzy logic six degree-of-freedom flight control system by the Ocean Voyager, an AUV currently under development. Heading, pitch, and depth are controlled simultaneously by three separate fuzzy logic controllers, each a function of setpoint error and error rate. An additional fuzzily constrained integrator compensates for frictional effects and setpoint error. The fuzzy controllers were tested and show good performance over a range of velocities. Another application described is a docking controller for the Ocean Voyager. This controller enables the AUV to dock with another underwater vehicle. Both moving and stationary targets are allowed. The fuzzy rule base recursively drives the vehicle toward intermediate fuzzy goals that become more precise as the final target is approached. The fuzzy goal approach does not rely on high accuracy maneuvers or waypoints. Docking proceeds as long as the AUV remains in a funnel of acceptable intermediate positions. Performance of the docking controller was tested by simulation. >

This paper addresses the motion control problem of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) perturbed by unknown hydrodynamic coefficients, unmodelled dynamics and environmental disturbances. The proposed algorithm consists of an adaptive subcontroller to tackle the parametric uncertainties and a robust term to vanish the effects of unstructured uncertainties and disturbances. The resulting robust adaptive controller ensures the convergence of tracking error, without any assumption on the upper bound of perturbations in the design procedure. The closed loop stability is shown, using the Lyapunov stability theorem, and verified by various simulations.

In general, the diving dynamics of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) has been derived under various assumptions on the motion of the vehicle in vertical plane. Usually, pitch angle of AUV is assumed to be small in maneuvering, so that the nonlinear dynamics in the depth motion of the vehicle could be linearized. However, a small-pitch-angle is a somewhat strong restricting condition and may cause serious modeling inaccuracies of AUV’s dynamics. For this reason, many researchers concentrated their interests on the applications of adaptive control methodology to the motion control of underwater vehicle. In this chapter, we directly resolve the nonlinear equation of the AUV’s diving motion without any restricting assumption on the pitch angle in diving model. The proposed adaptive neuro-fuzzy sliding mode controller (ANFSMC) with a proportional + integral + derivative (PID) sliding surface is derived so that the actual depth position tracks the desired trajectory despite uncertainty, nonlinear dynamics and external disturbances. In the proposed control structure, the corrective term is approximated by a continuous fuzzy logic control and the equivalent control is determined by a feedforward neural network. The weights of the neural network are updated such that the corrective control term of the ANFSMC goes to zero. The adaptive laws are employed to adjust the output scaling factor and to compute PID sliding surface coefficients. Finally, the lyapunov theory is employed to prove the stability of the ANFSMC for trajectory tracking of diving behaviors. Simulation results show that this control strategy can attain excellent control performance.

This paper is concerned with the security sliding mode-based leader-following control of multiple autonomous unmanned underwater vehicles (AUVs) system subject to stochastic DoS attacks. Firstly, a Bernoulli variable is used to describe the phenomenon of stochastic DoS attacks between controllers and actuators, and the attack probability is known for controller design. Secondly, the closed-loop system is established by taking the integral sliding mode control scheme and stochastic DoS attacks into account. Then, the conditions of stochastic stability for system are given by using the stochastic systems analysis method and the model decomposition technique. In the simulation part, a group of AUVs models is used to verify the validity of the proposed state consensus control scheme. The simulation example shows that all the state can achieve consensus even in presence of randomly launched DoS attack.