Stability analysis of a small scale remotely operated underwater glider

Abstract

The conventional process of maintaining underwater depth level for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) requires an operator to have a high skill and experience. Therefore, it is an important assessment to develop an automatic control scheme for underwater depth level control system and fabricate an underwater vehicle’s prototype body as a test-bed to implement and study the performance of control scheme. Hence, the purposes of this research are to design, model and fabricate a prototype body of a Remotely Operated underwater Glider (ROG) and analyze stability equilibrium of the new glider design. This research also attempts to develop a programmable ON/OFF control scheme for the underwater depth level control system and study the performance of the control scheme by experimental verification and trials. The ROG is modelled based on the SLOCUM glider and Seaglider designs using SolidWork and MAXSURF HYDROMAX is employed to calculate the stability equilibrium. The collected real time data are analyzed using the MATLAB System Identification ToolboxTM to verify the ROG’s net weight-depth system. As a conclusion, the ROG has a cylindrical body shape and the stability calculation shows that the ROG is at stable equilibrium state when heeling from 0.