Guidance and Control for Underactuated Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

The main focus of this paper is on the motion planning problem for an under-actuated, submerged, omni-directional autonomous vehicle. Underactuation is extremely important to consider in ocean research and exploration. Battery failure, actuator malfunction and electronic shorts are a few reasons that may cause the vehicle to loose direct control of one or more degrees-of-freedom. Underactuation is also critical to understand when designing vehicles for specific tasks, such as torpedo-shaped vehicles. An under-actuated vehicle is less controllable, and hence, the motion planning problem is more difficult. Here, we present new techniques based on geometric control to provide solutions to the under-actuated motion planning problem. Our results are validated with experiments.