In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Supercavitation is an emerging technology that enables underwater vehicles to reach unprecedented speed. With proper design of cavitator attached to the vehicle nose, the vehicle body is surrounded by water vapor cavity, eliminating skin friction drag. This technology offers unprecedented drag reduction, though poses problems for vehicle design. The gas bubble surrounding the hull introduces highly coupled dynamic behavior, representing a challenge for the control designer. Development of stable, controllable supercavitating vehicles requires solution for several open problems. This dissertation addresses the problem of control oriented modeling, stability augmentation, and reference tracking using parameter dependent control techniques for supercavitating vehicles. The thesis is divided into three parts. A nonlinear dynamical model capturing the most important properties of the vehicle motion is developed from a control design perspective. The model includes memory effects associated with the time evolution of the cavity and uses lookup tables to determine forces. To aid understanding the cavity-vehicle interaction, a longitudinal control scenario is developed for a simplified longitudinal dynamical model with guaranteed properties. Significant insight is gained on planing behavior and operating envelope using constrained control inputs. Extending the longitudinal control problem, a linear parameter varying model of the coupled motion is developed to provide a platform for parameter dependent control synthesis. The mathematical model is scheduled with aerodynamic angles, uses steady-state approximation of the cavity, leading to uncertainty in the governing equations. Two Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) controllers are synthesized for the angle rate tracking problem, taking uncertainty into account. One uses traditional decoupled loops for pitch-, rolland yaw-rate tracking. Ignoring the cross coupling, leads to more tractable subproblems . A controller, taking advantage of the coupling, is also presented in the thesis. The complexity