A Method for Time-Optimal Trajectory Planning for Underwater Vehicles Based on Thrust Maximization

JORDAN, MARIO ALBERTO; BUSTAMANTE, JORGE

Santiago de Cuba, Cuba

Conferencia; International Conference of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, FIE’06; 2006

Universidad de Oriente, Santiago de Cuba, Cuba

An approach to optimal generation of trajectories in autonomous navigation of underwater vehicles is presented. The framework for this approach was an adaptive control for path-following of arbitrary 3D trajectories. For the trajectory generation a special ordinary differential equation (ODE) is constructed. This automatically determines the maximal rate for translation and rotation in the 6 modes of the vehicle. Particularly, this ODE establishes the solution for a virtual monotonically increasing time τ (that is commonly different to the uniformly increasing true one t), which plays the role of an independent argument in the positioning and cinematic reference trajectories. So the vehicle acquires an optimal cinematic profile automatically. A design parameter that specifies a desired energy consumption of the thrusters is given to avoid vehicle skids from the path at sharp curves. Examples with a case study show the high performance and speed achieved by a controlled AUV during the path-tracking.