On the prediction of manoeuvrability of the autonomous underwater vehicle, AUV-HM1

The manoeuvrability of the unmanned untethered submersible AUV-HM1 testbed developed at the Department of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering of National Taiwan University is investigated through two sets of stability indices, one is evaluated by the estimated values of stability derivatives, the others are those obtained by a series of captive model tests. Those results presented in the previous papers (Chiu et al. (1996, 1997)) have shown that the present configuration of AUV-HM1 is stable in longitudinal motion mode, and is unstable in lateral motion mode. In the present paper, a combined computation method of the higher order source panels and the vortex lattice method is developed and applied to the calculation of stability derivatives of AUV-HM1 testbed. It is shown that accurate results can be obtained in the non-separate 3D lifting body flows. It would need some further considerations of the present computation method to deal with the separate flows.