Dynamics and Control of Underwater Gliding

I am in terested in establishing a framework for studying dynamics and control of underwater gliders. I am focussing on dedicated gliding vehicles that hav e the ability to change mass (or v olume) for buoyancy control and to redistribute mass for attitude control. Later on it is of in terest to consider vehicles that use glide maneuvers to complement more traditional methods of control actuation. The framework will consist of a dynamical systems model of underwater gliding vehicles together with techniques for generating and controlling glide maneuvers in the presence of uncertainty. The rst objective is to develop a model that is representative of a general class of underwater gliders. Then, dynamics and stability should be studied follo wed b y the development of control laws for stabilizing individual glide motions, e.g., straight-line or spiral glide paths. Next, it is intended to develop techniques for concatenating stabilized glide motions to perform maneuvers, follo wwaypoints and track trajectories. A further objective is to develop methodology for assigning performance measures and then to optimize v ehicle control design with respect to these measures. Additionally, it is of interest to address problems in coordinating control for a network of underwater gliders.