Skip to main content
Log in

Positioning control of an underwater robot with tilting thrusters via decomposition of thrust vector

  • Regular Papers
  • Robot and Applications
  • Published:
International Journal of Control, Automation and Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Positioning control of an underwater robot is a challenging problem due to the high disturbances of ocean flow. To overcome the high disturbance, a new underwater robot with tilting thrusters was proposed previously, which can compensate for disturbance by focusing the thrusting force in the direction of the disturbance. However, the tilting motion of the thrusters makes the system nonlinear, and the limited tilting speed sometimes makes the robot unstable. Therefore, an optimized controller is necessary. A new positioning controller is proposed for this robot using a vector decomposition method. Based on the dynamic model, the nonlinear force input term of the tilting thrusters is decomposed in the horizontal and vertical directions. Based on the decomposition, the solution is determined by a pseudo-inverse and null-space solution. Using the characteristics of the decomposed input matrix, the final solution can be found by solving a simple second-order algebraic equation to overcome the limitations of the tilting speed. The positioning was simulated to validate the proposed controller by comparing the results with a switching-based controller. Tracking results are also presented. In future work, a high-level control strategy will be developed to take advantage of the tilting thrusters by focusing the forcing direction toward the disturbance with a limited stability margin.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. J. Yuh, “Design and control of autonomous underwater robots: A survey,” Autonomous Robots, vol. 8, no. 1, pp.7–24, January 2000. [click]

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. S. Jin, J. Kim, J. Kim, and T. W. Seo, “Six-degree-offreedom hovering control of an underwater robotic platform with four tilting thrusters via selective switching control,” IEEE/ASME Trans. on Mechatronics, vol. 20, no 5, pp. 2370–2378, October 2015.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. D. Ribas, N. Palomeras, P. Ridao, M. Carreras, and A. Mallios, “Girona 500 auv: from survey to intervention,” IEEE/ASME Trans. on Mechatronics, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 46–53, February 2012.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. S. K. Choi, J. Yuh, and G. T. Takashige, “Development of the omni directional intelligent navigator,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 44–53, March 1995. [click]

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. H. Kondo, T. Ura, S. C. Yu, and Y. Nose, “Design of autonomous underwater vehicle Tri-Dog1 and tank tests,” Proc. of International Symposium Techno-Ocean, pp. 339–344, Kobe, Japan, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  6. G. A. Kantor, N. Fairfield, D. Jonak, and D. Wettergreen, Field and Service Robotics, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2008.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  7. M. Ryll, H. H. Bülthoff, and P. R. Giordano, “Modeling and control of a quadrotor UAV with tilting propellers,” Proc. of the Conf. Robotics and Automation, pp. 4606–4613, St. Paul, MN, USA, 2012.

    Google Scholar 

  8. A. D. Luca, G. Oriolo, and P. R. Giordano, “Kinematic control of nonholonomic mobile manipulators in the presence of steering wheels,” Proc. of the Conf. Robotics and Automation, pp. 1792–1798, Anchorage, Alaska, USA, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  9. S. Jin, J. Kim, J. W. Kim, J. Bae, J. Bak, J. Kim, and T. W. Seo, “Back-stepping control design for an underwater robot with tilting thrusters,” Proc. of the Conf. Advanced Robotics, pp. 27–31, 2015. [click]

    Google Scholar 

  10. S. I. Han and J. M. Lee, “Prescribed performance fuzzy backstepping control for nonlinear largescale systems,” International Journal of Control, Automation and Systems, vol. 13, no. 6, pp.1508–1520, December 2015. [click]

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Z. P. Jiang and H. Nijmeijer, “Tracking control of mobile robots: a case study in backstepping,” Automatica, vol. 33, no. 7, pp. 1393–1399, July 1997. [click]

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  12. S. Jin, J. Kim, S. Lee J. Kim, and T. W. Seo, “Empirical modeling of rotating thruster for underwater robotic platform,” Journal of Marine Science and Technology, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 118–126, March, Istanbul, Turkey, 2015.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. T. J. Tarn, A. K. Bejczy and Y. Chen, “Nonlinear feedback in robot arm control,” Proc. of the 23rd Conf. Decision and Control, pp. 736–751, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 1984.

    Google Scholar 

  14. V. Alstad and S. Skogestad, “Null space method for selecting optimal measurement combinations as controlled variables,” Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 846–853, January 2007.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. T. I. Fossen, Guidance and Control of Ocean Vehicles, John Wiley & Sons Inc, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  16. J. J. E. Slotine and W. Li, Applied Nonlinear Control, Prentice-Hall, 1991.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  17. J. Bak, J. W. Kim, S. Jin, J. Kim and T. W. Seo, “Hovering Performance Improvement by Modifying COG of Underwater Robotic Platform,” Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering, vol. 32 no.7, pp. 661–666, July 2015.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Sangrok Jin or Jongwon Kim.

Additional information

Recommended by Associate Editor Yingmin Jia under the direction of Editor Hyun-Seok Yang. This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning (NRF-2017R1A2B4002123).

Jeongae Bak received her B.S. degree in 2012 from the School of Mechanical Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea. She is currently working toward a Ph.D. degree at Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea. Her current research interests include underwater robotic platform design and control.

Hai-Nguyen Nguyen received his B.S. degree in Mechatronics and his M.S. degree in Engineering Mechanics from the Hanoi University of Science & Technology, Vietnam, 2008 and 2010. From 2009 to 2012, he was a permanent researcher with the Institute of Mechanics, Vietnam Academy of Science & Technology. He is currently working toward a Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering at Seoul National University. His research interests include dynamics and control problems related to aerial manipulation.

Sangyul Park received his B.S. degree in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering from the Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, 2013. He is currently working toward a Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Seoul National University. His research interests include design, modeling and control of aerial robotic systems.

Dongjun Lee is an Associate Professor with the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from KAIST, Korea, and the Ph.D. degree in Mechanical engineering from the University of Minnesota, respectively in 1995, 1997 and 2004. He was an Assistant Professor with the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Tennessee, 2006–2011, and a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 2004–2006. His main research interests are dynamics and control of robotic and mechatronic systems with emphasis on teleoperation/haptics, multirobot systems, aerial robots, and geometric mechanics control theory. Dr. Lee received the US NSF CAREER Award in 2009, the Best Paper Award from the IAS-2012, and the 2002–2003 Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship of the University of Minnesota. He was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

TaeWon Seo is an Assistant Professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering, Yeungnam University, Gyeongsan, Korea. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University, Korea, in 2003 and 2008, respectively. He was a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Nanorobotics Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University in 2009 and a Visiting Professor at the Biomimetic Millisystems Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley in 2015. His research interests include creative robotic platform design, control, mechanism analysis, and optimization. Dr. Seo received the 2014 Best Mechatronics Paper Award of the IEEE/ASME Transaction on Mechatronics.

Sangrok Jin received his B.S. degree in 2008 and his Ph.D. degree in 2014 from the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University, Korea. He is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Seoul National University. His research interests include underwater robot system design and control.

Jongwon Kim is a Professor in the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University, Korea. He received his B.S. degree from Seoul National University (SNU) in 1978, an M.S. degree from KAIST, Korea, in 1980, and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1987, all in mechanical engineering. From 1980 to 1989, he was with the Division of Machine Tools at Daewoo Heavy Industries (now Doosan Infracore). He is currently a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, SNU, and also a coordinator of the Robotics@SNU group. His current research interests include parallel mechanism machines, Taguchi methods, and robotic platform design. He was the director of the Intelligent Robotics Research Institute and the Institute of Advanced Machines and Design at SNU. He is currently the director of the ProCEED Idea Factory at SNU. His work on parallel mechanism machine tools and robots has been recognized with a best paper award from the ASME Manufacturing Engineering Division, the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) University LEAD Award, and the Outstanding Research Award from the Korean Society of Precision Engineers. He has also received several teaching excellence awards from the University, the SNU College of Engineering, and the Korean Society for Engineering Education.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Bak, J., Nguyen, HN., Park, S. et al. Positioning control of an underwater robot with tilting thrusters via decomposition of thrust vector. Int. J. Control Autom. Syst. 15, 2283–2291 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-016-0298-x

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-016-0298-x

Keywords

Navigation