Modeling, Control and Experiments of a Novel Underwater Vehicle with Dual Operating Modes for Oceanographic Observation

Abstract

Multifarious and continuous oceanographic observation data is of considerable significance to oceanographic research and military application. In this paper, a novel oceanographic observation method with dual-modal underwater vehicle able to switch between the Argo and Glider modes is proposed and is studied experimentally in the South China Sea. Using the Newton–Euler formulation, a complete dynamic model considering the variation in gravity/buoyancy due to mode switching is thus established. Then, based on Lyapunov stability criterion, a nonlinear adaptive inverse controller with multiple inputs and multiple outputs is developed which enables the observation platform to freely switch between various modes. By analyzing the numerical and experimental data of a single mode, the results demonstrate that the proposed method can supplement the observation data and improve the accuracy of oceanographic data. Finally, based on experimental data acquired by the dual-modal underwater vehicle in the South China Sea, three-dimensional regional oceanic temperature and salinity fields are constructed with the spatio-temporal Kriging method, and feature surfaces are extracted from the oceanic fields. Furthermore, the proposed method can be applied in other stirring dynamic regions, such as ocean eddies, ocean fronts, filaments, etc.