Development of a hybrid-driven autonomous underwater glider with a biologically inspired motion control system

This paper presents prototype development of a hybrid-driven autonomous underwater glider with a biologically inspired motion control system. The hybrid-driven glider with an independently controllable wings and a rudder was developed to overcome the drawback of a typical buoyancy-driven underwater glider in terms of speed and maneuverability. However, it is difficult to control the glider due to the high nonlinear and time-varying dynamic behavior of the glider; uncertainties in hydrodynamics coefficients; and disturbances by water currents. Thus, a robust and reliable bio-inspired controller algorithm has been designed. The controller algorithm has been designed to mimic a human innate control mechanism, which is known as homeostatic controller. The performance of the homeostatic controller of the hybrid-driven glider has been analyzed via simulation and experimental. From the simulation result, our homeostatic controller achieves better performance compared to the LQR, MPC, NN and neuroendocrine controller approaches. Furthermore, validation analysis of the homeostatic controller performance between the simulation and experimental results have shown very satisfactory performance.