Design of a new high speed unmanned underwater glider and motion control

In this paper, the design and control of a new underwater glider having a high horizontal speed was studied. For this, the capacity of buoyancy engine which performs 2.5(knots) horizontal speed was designed. Especially, a controllable buoyancy engine to regulate the amount of buoyancy was designed and developed for control of the pitching angle of UG and the mass shifter carrying the battery was designed for controlling pitching and yawing motion of the UG. A mathematical modeling based on six degree-of-freedom dynamics equation including the buoyancy engine and mass shifter dynamics was performed to control the UG. Using the mathematical model, a simulation of the yaw motion control of the UG is presented. A number of sea experiments were performed to verify the navigation performance of the developed UG.