Identification of the inertial model for innovative semi-immergible USV (SI-USV) drone for marine and lakes operations

Abstract

The proposed project shows the results obtained in the implementation and testing in lacustrine and marine environment of a nautical remote controlled vehicle with surface navigation and innovative features Semi-Immergible (SI-USV). This vehicle is based on a pending patent belonging to Palermo University (Patent Pending RM2012A000209 and Patent RM2014Z000060) concerning innovative semi-immersible vehicles (SI-Drone), that can be remotely controlled from the ground, air, satellite and sea also during the semi-immersible operation. Given its low draft, the electric powered vehicle, coupled with jet propulsion, makes it possible to navigate in shallow waters, coastal shipping or sandbars. This complete system SI-Drone can solve the typical logistic problem occurring in very shallow water contexts (such as ports, rivers, lacustrine environment and marine coastal), where the low depth of the water column (generally less than 10 mt) presents several challenges, including near-field effect and operability difficulties. Then, the proposed system can be used for applications in the fields of ports, lakes monitoring, organic fish - marine, hydrography, geology / geophysics, oceanography, underwater acoustics and environmental monitoring with particular attention to climate change impact indicators. This paper deal with two dimensional motion control of DRONES based on merging of Fuzzy/Lyapunov and kinetic controllers. A fuzzy kinetic controller generates the surge speeds and the yaw rates of each DRONE, to achieve the objective of the planar motion planned by the decentralized algorithm, and it ensures robustness with respect to perturbations of the marine environment, forward surge speed control and saturation of the control signals, while the kinetic controller generates the thruster surge forces and the yaw torques of all the DRONE. The Lyapunov's stability of the equilibrium state of the closed loop motion control system is proved based on the properties of the Fuzzy maps for all the underwater vehicles, so that the stabilization of each semi-immergible vehicle in the planned trajectory is ensured. The validity of this control algorithm is also supported by simulation experiments. The procedures applied in the present article, as well as the main equations used, are the result of previous applications made in different technical fields that show a good replicability (1 - 4).