• International Journal of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.865-874
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• 2019

A controller for an underwater glider is presented. Considered underwater glider is a torpedo-shaped autonomous underwater vehicle installing adjustable buoyancy bag and movable battery in it. The controller is composed of an LQR controller to maintain zigzag vertical movement for gliding and two PD controllers to control elevator/rudder angles. The LQR controller controls the pumping speed into the buoyancy bag and the moving speed to locate the battery. One of the PD controller controls the elevator angle to assist the LQR controller, and the other controls the rudder angle to adjust the direction of the underwater glider. A reduced order Luenberger observer is adopted to estimates the center of gravity of the glider and the buoyancy mass that are essential but cannot be measured. Mathematical simulation using Matlab proved the validity of the proposed controller to obtain better performance than conventional LQR only controller under the influence of sea current.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Marine Environment & Safety
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.441-450
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• 2022

The introduction of autonomous underwater gliders (AUGs) specifically addresses the reduction of operational costs that were previously prohibited with conventional autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) using a "scaling-down" design philosophy by utilizing the characteristics of autonomous drifters to far extend operation duration and coverage. Long-duration, wide-area missions raise the cost and complexity of in-water testing for novel approaches to autonomous mission planning. As a result, a simulator that supports the rapid design, development, and testing of autonomy solutions across a wide range using software-in-the-loop simulation at faster-than-real-time speeds becomes critical. This paper describes a faster-than-real-time AUG simulator that can support high-resolution bathymetry for a wide variety of ocean environments, including ocean currents, various sensors, and vehicle dynamics. On top of the de facto standard ROS-Gazebo framework and open-sourced underwater vehicle simulation packages, features specific to AUGs for ocean mapping are developed. For vehicle dynamics, the next-generation hybrid autonomous underwater gliders (Hybrid-AUGs) operate with both the buoyancy engine and the thrusters to improve navigation for bathymetry mappings, e.g., line trajectory, are is implemented since because it can also describe conventional AUGs without the thrusters. The simulation results are validated with experiments while operating at 120 times faster than the real-time.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.311-318
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• 2017

A reduced order observer is developed for depth control of a hybrid underwater glider which combines the good aspects of a conventional autonomous underwater vehicle and a underwater glider. State variables include the center of gravity of the robot and the weight of the buoyancy bag, which can not be directly measured. By using the mathematical model and available information such as directional velocities, accelerations, and attitudes, we developed a Luenberger's reduced order observer to estimate the center of gravity and the buoyancy weight. By simulations using Matlab/Simulink, the efficiency of the proposed observer is shown, where a LQR controller using full state variables is adopted as a depth controller.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.25-31
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• 2019

An underwater glider is a type of autonomous unmanned vehicle and it advances using a vertical zig-zag glide. For this purpose, the position of an internal battery is regulated to control its attitude, and the amount of water in a buoyancy bag is regulated to control the depth. Underwater glider is suitable for a long-distance mission for a long time, because the required energy is much smaller than the conventional autonomous unmanned vehicle using propeller propulsion system. In this paper, control of horizontal tail wing is newly added to the conventional battery position and buoyancy control. The performance of the proposed controller is shown through Matlab simulation.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.21-29
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• 2017

In this paper, we studied the control of the hybrid underwater glider (HUG), which has the advantage of high precision route search function and long-term mission capability. Dynamic modeling of HUG is based on numerical model of the attitude controller and buoyancy engine, thruster. We designed the control part considering the smooth control and precise sailing of HUG. A buoyancy engine capable of inhaling water is designed to control the buoyancy of HUG. And mass shifter carrying the battery was designed for controlling pitching motion of HUG. A control system for controlling the buoyancy engine and the attitude controller was constructed. In order to verify performance, we performed water tank test using manufactured HUG.