Experimental analysis of low‐altitude terrain following for hover‐capable flight‐style autonomous underwater vehicles

Abstract

Operating an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) in close proximity to terraintypically relies solely on the vehicle sensors for terrain detection, and challenges themanoeuvrability of energy efficient flight‐style AUVs. This paper gives new results onaltitude tracking limits of such vehicles by using the fully understood environment ofa lake to perform repeated experiments while varying the altitude demand, obstacledetection and actuator use of a hover‐capable flight‐style AUV. The results areanalysed for mission success, vehicle risk and repeatability, demonstrating the terrainfollowing capabilities of the overactuated AUV over a range of altitude trackingstrategies and how these measures better inform vehicle operators. A majorconclusion is that the effects of range limits, bias and false detections of the sensorsused for altitude tracking must be fully accounted for to enable mission success.Furthermore it was found that switching between hover‐ and flight‐style actuationsbased on speed, whilst varying the operation speed, has advantages for performanceimprovement over combining hover‐ and flight‐style actuators at high speeds

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Identifiers

ORCID for Stephen Turnock: orcid.org/0000-0001-6288-0400

ORCID for Eric Rogers: orcid.org/0000-0003-0179-9398

ORCID for Alexander Phillips: orcid.org/0000-0003-3234-8506

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