Title: Assessing the feasibility of underwater vehicle controllers in underactuated hovercrafts via simulations

Authors: Przemyslaw Herman

Addresses: Institute of Automatic Control and Robotics, Poznan University of Technology, ul. Piotrowo 3a, 60-965 Poznan, Poland

Abstract: The paper presents a comparison of several selected trajectory tracking controllers used for an underactuated hovercraft. The aim of the study is to check if algorithms that have proved to be effective for another class of vehicles can be adapted to control a hovercraft. In order to compare the effectiveness of the controllers, one that is exclusively designed to control the hovercraft and three others that are suitable for the control of underactuated underwater vehicles were examined. This study also proposes a methodology for simulation analysis of control algorithms. The initial simulation tests demonstrated on the 3-DOF hovercraft model show the results that can be obtained by using each control algorithm under the proposed assumptions.

Keywords: underactuated hovercraft; nonlinear model; nonlinear control; trajectory tracking; simulation; algorithm selection criteria; suitability assessment; test of controllers.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMIC.2021.119036

International Journal of Modelling, Identification and Control, 2021 Vol.37 No.1, pp.45 - 56

Received: 06 Jul 2020
Accepted: 22 Dec 2020
Published online: 18 Nov 2021 *

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