An underwater glider is a buoyancy-driven, fixed-wing underwater vehicle that redistributes internal mass to control attitude. We examine the dynamics of a glider restricted to the vertical plane and derive a feedback law that stabilizes steady glide paths. The control law is physically motivated and with the appropriate choice of output can be interpreted as providing input-output feedback linearization. With this choice of output, we extend the feedback linearization approach to design control laws to coordinate the gliding motion of multiple underwater gliders.
Published in:
Decision and Control, 2002, Proceedings of the 41st IEEE Conference on
(Volume:2
)
Date of Conference: 10-13 Dec. 2002