摘要：Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), distinguished by their advanced autonomy, offer significant potential for expanding the horizons of underwater exploration and missions. However, using AUVs for extended range or deep-sea operations faces a substantial challenge due to limited vehicle endurance, thereby imposing constraints on their applications. This challenge can be effectively addressed by implementing sophisticated and robust energy management strategies, including energy-optimized planning and control methodologies. These approaches hold the potential to significantly augment AUV operational energy efficiency, thereby extending their endurance and broadening their operational scope.

In this presentation, we will delve into the realm of AUV operations, specifically focusing on energy management strategies designed to enhance efficiency during sustained operations. We will introduce an active perception framework geared towards accurate flow predictions. Combining path planning with flow field identification, this approach enables AUV to adapt to the dynamic underwater environment for optimal energy efficiency. Additionally, for real-time control, an Economic Model Predictive Control (EMPC) has been developed. This EMPC leverages the inherent hydrodynamic characteristics of AUVs to strike a balance between optimality and computational efficiency. Through these discussions, we aim to shed light on innovative strategies that hold promises to enhance the overall energy efficiency of AUVs, thereby advancing their underwater exploration and mission capabilities in diverse operational scenarios.

摘要：Following a brief overview of some of recent advancements in the navigation, guidance, and control of marine vehicles at KIRO over the past decade, this talk will primarily address the control issue, especially the trajectory tracking problem for a class of underactuated marine vehicles.

Trajectory tracking of underactuated system has been a challenging and also interesting topic in the nonlinear control community over the past decades. Based on the different ways of reference trajectory design, this trajectory tracking problem usually can be classified into two categories: trajectory tracking and path following, where the former one further can be divided into the traditional trajectory tracking and trajectory following. This talk addresses the traditional trajectory tracking problem for a class of underactuated marine vehicles. Compared to the previous related works where the proposed methods usually depended on the vehicle’s specifically simplified dynamics and also needed various restricting conditions on the reference trajectory, in this talk we try to provide a sort of general form of controller with general form of vehicle’s dynamics and also without any restriction on both of the vehicle’s dynamics and the reference trajectory.

摘要：Structure-preserving numerical integration for ordinary differential equations is very crucial in numerical simulation of dynamical systems. In general, numerical integration of ordinary differential equations is expected to preserve first integrals and state-space manifolds such as energy, angular momentum and SO(3) for the free rigid body dynamics. As such, structure-preserving integration has been a vast research area for which various algorithms have been developed such as symplectic integrators, variational integrators and so on. Most of the algorithms, however, require special tricks, case-by-case, such as solving implicitly defined algebraic equations at each integration step or using a particular parameterization of a given manifold.

In this talk, I will present a new method of structure-preserving integration, called feedback integrators, which does not require any of these special tricks but rather allows one to generally use any off-the-shelf numerical integrators such as the Euler method and the Runge-Kutta method, in order to numerically integrate a given dynamical system while preserving its conserved quantities. Feedback integrators apply to holonomic mechanical systems and non-holonomic mechanical systems as well as regular mechanical systems. They also extend to controller design for systems defined on manifolds. The theory of feedback integrators is still in the making to which everyone is welcome.