Motivation:
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) intended for long-term deployment are often equipped with only a single thruster in order to conserve energy, as thrusters are usually the most power hungry components in an AUV due to friction losses. Conventional AUV designs use steering wings or rudders for steering which creates drag/lift at an eccentric point in the body causing vehicle to steer. In addition to creating even more energy losses due to hydrodynamic drag, there is a limitation on the steering angles allowed before stalling begins to occur which limits immensly the maeuverability of such systems. Thrust vectoring can alleviate drag losses and significantly improve the meaverability as the direction of the thruster can be controlled. This project aims at designing a robust nonlinear Model Predictive Controller (MPC) for such underactuated systems operating under environmental disturbances.
Goal:
- Developmentof a robust nonlinear MPC scheme to perform hydrobatic maneuvers with a thrust vectored AUV
- Perform system identification on the AUV DeepLeng
- Test the developed method on the real system at DFKI's water basin
Prior Knowledge:
- Knowledge in advanced control theory ( Lyapunov functions, Hinf etc
- Excellent programming skills in C/C++ and Python
- Experience in paper writing and publications are a major plus
- Hands on experience with real robotic systems is a plus
Related Work:
- Rust, L., Vyas, S Wehbe, B Kirchner, F 2023 AUV Trajectory Optimization with hydrodynamic forces for icy moon exploration. In 17 th Symposium on Advanced Space
Technologies in Robotics and Automation, 18-20 October 2023.
- Heshmati Alamdari S Nikou, A Dimarogonas D V 2020 Robust trajectory tracking control for underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles in uncertain
environments. IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, 18(3), 1288-1301.
We look forward to receiving your complete informative application documents (please include transcript of grades). For further information and application, please contact bilal.wehbe@dfki.de.
Contact:
Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH
Robotics Innovation Center
Robert-Hooke-Str. 1
28359 Bremen, Germany
www.dfki.de/ric
Bilal Wehbe
Phone: +49 421 17845 4168
bilal.wehbe[at]dfki.de
