Recent Advances in Motion Control of Underwater Vehicles for Inspection Applications

Underwater vehicles have gained a widespread interest in the last decades, from various research communities (design, actuation, communication, perception, modelling, navigation, control, etc), given the multiple tasks they can accomplish. Their applications are multiple in different fields, such as underwater inspection, oil and gas offshore industry, aquaculture, wind parks, hydroelectric power stations, underwater archeology, ocean cartography, air crash and environmental investigations, etc.

One of the potential applications of these systems deals with inspection of underwater facilities such as bridges, hydraulic dams, Ship hulls, aquatic environments, etc. When we are interested in autonomous control of underwater vehicles, different challenges may arise. These challenges are mainly due to the inherent high nonlinearities and time varying behavior of the vehicle’s dynamics subject to hydrodynamic effects and external disturbances. In order to avoid the degradation in the performance of the controlled system during a specific mission, the vehicle is expected to possess a certain robustness and a self-tuning ability to compensate for different kinds of uncertainties, parameters variation and external disturbances. That is why robust/adaptive controllers are widely used for such complex systems.

This talk will be focused mainly on motion control of small underwater vehicles for inspection applications. It will be focused on (i) general context, (ii) control problem formulation, (iii) related challenges (iv) control design issues and proposed solutions, and finally (v) validation of the proposed control solutions through real-time experiments.

Speaker(s): Dr. Ahmed Chemori,

Agenda:
The talk will be virtual by Zoom on April 23, 2022 between 1:00 and 2:30 PM EST. There is no fee and everybody is invited. Plaese use the following link to participate.

Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/307246