Vectored Thrust Control of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have developed over the last decades into one of the most important technological research platforms for marine/ocean exploration. Increased advancements in this area have lead to more robust, precise and intelligent hardware and software solutions which AUVs can benefit from. To achieve their required tasks, a key aspect is the control architecture which determines the vehicle's movement.
In DFKI’s Eurex-Luna project, a pilot survey is conducted to explore  the deep ocean of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Such mission stresses the need of an energy efficient and particularly reliable control framework of the AUV. To meet such constraints, the AUV will have to have the capability to be  actuated by only one vectored thruster that can be rotated in order to steer the vehicle. This actuation concept eliminates the need of using additional thrusters, which decreases the energy consumption of the system but on the other hand constrains it's maneuverability.
This thesis introduces a control framework to enable reliable trajectory following using the vectored thrust actuation concept. In this framework a model-based control approach will be followed to account for the non-linear hydrodynamic effects of the vehicle's motion. Given the output of the control law, the control allocation of the vehicle's actuators will be addressed as a constrained optimization problem. Finally, the actuator commands will be calculated using the inverse kinematics of the vectoring mechanism.