Fish lateral line inspired hydrodynamic force estimation for autonomous underwater vehicle control

Considerable evidence suggests that the lateral line system found in most fish and some other aquatic organisms serves an important role in many behaviors by providing hydrodynamic information about the surrounding fluid. A lateral line inspired pressure feedforward control design was proposed by the group; the goal of the research is to improve maneuvering accuracy for autonomous underwater vehicles by estimating the pressure distribution around the vehicle bodies. In this paper, instead of segregating the hydrodynamic forces into added mass and damping terms and finding the corresponding coefficients, the forces are directly approximated with pressure sensor measurements and passed to the controller for improved performance. Simulation tests are presented to compare the trajectory tracking performance between the proposed feedforward control system and the one developed with traditional hydrodynamic modeling process. Experimental tests are conducted to verify the force estimation algorithm.