Development and control of a vectored water-jet-based spherical underwater vehicle

This paper presents a spherical underwater vehicle which uses three vectored water-jet propulsion systems. In this paper, firstly, we proposed the concept of a vectored water-jet based spherical underwater vehicle. Then we give the basic design of this underwater vehicle. The working principles of the vectored water-jet propellers is illustrated including the transformation of reference frames, the distribution of propellers and the composition of vectored propel forces. Thirdly, we give the results of simulation experiment which compares traditional PID control and BP neural network based PID control. This control experiment only focus on the horizontal motion, but it can be expanded in the other control plane easily.