Modeling and control of a jellyfish-inspired AUV

Abstract

Current autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) designs have a serious deficiency in autonomy time due to its ballistic type of construction: a cylindrical body propelled by a rear engine. This type of design does not take complete advantage of the fluid that has to be displaced to move the vehicle forward, reducing the overall system efficiency and consequently its operation time. In order to overcome this limitation, research has focused on understanding of the propulsive mechanisms employed by the natural organisms. Jellyfish is one of the simplest and most relevant model systems as it exhibits one of the lowest cost-of-transport among all the known creatures. The learning and implementation of jellyfish-inspired vehicle design requires an evaluation of the current mathematical modeling approaches in order to adequately describe the dynamics of such a vehicle. This paper develops a time-varying rigid body model for the kinematics and dynamics of an AUV based on jellyfish rowing propulsion. A nonlinear sliding mode controller is also proposed to drive the system.