Guidance and control of an autonomous underwater vehicle

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/856 on 07.03.2017 by CS (TIS)A cooperative project between the Universities of Plymouth and Cranfield was aimed at designing and developing an autonomous underwater vehicle named Hammerhead. The work presented herein is to formulate an advance guidance and control system and to implement it in the Hammerhead. This involves the description of Hammerhead hardware from a control system perspective. In addition to the control system, an intelligent navigation scheme and a state of the art vision system is also developed. However, the development of these submodules is out of the scope of this thesis. To model an underwater vehicle, the traditional way is to acquire painstaking mathematical models based on laws of physics and then simplify and linearise the models to some operating point. One of the principal novelties of this research is the use of system identification techniques on actual vehicle data obtained from full scale in water experiments. Two new guidance mechanisms have also been formulated for cruising type vehicles. The first is a modification of the proportional navigation guidance for missiles whilst the other is a hybrid law which is a combination of several guidance strategies employed during different phases of the Right. In addition to the modelling process and guidance systems, a number of robust control methodologies have been conceived for Hammerhead. A discrete time linear quadratic Gaussian with loop transfer recovery based autopilot is formulated and integrated with the conventional and more advance guidance laws proposed. A model predictive controller (MPC) has also been devised which is constructed using artificial intelligence techniques such as genetic algorithms (GA) and fuzzy logic. A GA is employed as an online optimization routine whilst fuzzy logic has been exploited as an objective function in an MPC framework. The GA-MPC autopilot has been implemented in Hammerhead in real time and results demonstrate excellent robustness despite the presence of disturbances and ever present modelling uncertainty. To the author's knowledge, this is the first successful application of a GA in real time optimization for controller tuning in the marine sector and thus the thesis makes an extremely novel and useful contribution to control system design in general. The controllers are also integrated with the proposed guidance laws and is also considered to be an invaluable contribution to knowledge. Moreover, the autopilots are used in conjunction with a vision based altitude information sensor and simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the controllers to cope with uncertain altitude demands.J&S MARINE LTD., QINETIQ, SUBSEA 7 AND SOUTH WEST WATER PL

A Survey of Recent Machine Learning Solutions for Ship Collision Avoidance and Mission Planning

Machine Learning (ML) techniques have gained significant traction as a means of improving the autonomy of marine vehicles over the last few years. This article surveys the recent ML approaches utilised for ship collision avoidance (COLAV) and mission planning. Following an overview of the ever-expanding ML exploitation for maritime vehicles, key topics in the mission planning of ships are outlined. Notable papers with direct and indirect applications to the COLAV subject are technically reviewed and compared. Critiques, challenges, and future directions are also identified. The outcome clearly demonstrates the thriving research in this field, even though commercial marine ships incorporating machine intelligence able to perform autonomously under all operating conditions are still a long way off

A Survey of Recent Machine Learning Solutions for Ship Collision Avoidance and Mission Planning

Machine Learning (ML) techniques have gained significant traction as a means of improving the autonomy of marine vehicles over the last few years. This article surveys the recent ML approaches utilised for ship collision avoidance (COLAV) and mission planning. Following an overview of the ever-expanding ML exploitation for maritime vehicles, key topics in the mission planning of ships are outlined. Notable papers with direct and indirect applications to the COLAV subject are technically reviewed and compared. Critiques, challenges, and future directions are also identified. The outcome clearly demonstrates the thriving research in this field, even though commercial marine ships incorporating machine intelligence able to perform autonomously under all operating conditions are still a long way off.Peer reviewe

An Adaptive fuzzy-PD inertial control strategy for a DFIG wind turbine for frequency support

With increasing levels of wind generation in power systems, guaranteeing continuous power and system’s safety is essential. Frequency control is critical which requires a supplementary inertial control strategy. Since wind power generation depends directly on wind conditions, this creates an immense challenge for a conventional inertial controller with parameters suitable for all power grid operations and wind speed conditions. Therefore, tuning the controller gains is absolutely critical for an integrated conventional/renewable power system. Here, a fuzzy-logic adaptive inertial controller scheme for online tuning of the proportional-derivative-type (PD) inertial controller parameters is proposed. The proposed controller adapts the control parameters of the supplementary inertial control of the doubly fed induction generator (DFIG) wind turbine so that with any disturbance such as load changes, the active power output can be controlled to mitigate the frequency deviation. Simulation results indicate that the proposed adaptive controller demonstrates a more consistent and robust response to load changes compared to a conventional controller with fixed parameters

Greetings from the conference chairs

Presents the introductory welcome message from the conference proceedings. May include the conference officers' congratulations to all involved with the conference event and publication of the proceedings record

Reinforcement Learning-Enhanced Control Barrier Functions for Robot Manipulators

In this paper we present the implementation of a Control Barrier Function (CBF) using a quadratic program (QP) formulation that provides obstacle avoidance for a robotic manipulator arm system. CBF is a control technique that has emerged and developed over the past decade and has been extensively explored in the literature on its mathematical foundations, proof of set invariance and potential applications for a variety of safety-critical control systems. In this work we will look at the design of CBF for the robotic manipulator obstacle avoidance, discuss the selection of the CBF parameters and present a Reinforcement Learning (RL) scheme to assist with finding parameters values that provide the most efficient trajectory to successfully avoid different sized obstacles. We then create a data-set across a range of scenarios used to train a Neural-Network (NN) model that can be used within the control scheme to allow the system to efficiently adapt to different obstacle scenarios. Computer simulations (based on Matlab/Simulink) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm

RBPF-MSIS: Toward Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filter SLAM for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle With Slow Mechanical Scanning Imaging Sonar

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has the potential to play a fundamental and significant role in achieving full autonomy for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV). This article proposes a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter (RBPF) SLAM algorithm for an AUV equipped with a mechanically scanning imaging sonar (MSIS) that has a very slow scanning frequency. To tackle the issues of scan distortion and sonar data sparseness caused by the slow-sampling MSIS, the core of the algorithm is a carefully designed sliding window-based scan forming module. Then the formed scans are fed into the modified RBPF to build a consistent grid-based map thus localizing the AUV accurately. Extensive simulation and experiments are carried out to verify the proposed algorithm. The results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing ones in terms of the level of map consistency with the environment as well as the accuracy of pose estimation