Stabilization System of AUV for Implementation of Contact Manipulation Operations

The paper describes an approach to the synthesis of automatic hover mode stabilization systems of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) equipped with multilink manipulators (MM). The proposed approach involves the installation of an additional thruster on the AUV. This thruster is located above the AUV center of the buoyancy on the outrigger rod in such a way that the thrust formed by the thruster is directed along the transverse horizontal axis of the vehicle. This expands the original propulsion and steering complex (PSC) and allows to compensate for the effects from the MM that cause the displacements of the AUV along the roll angle. Based on the features of the thrusters layout scheme, control signals of the extended PSC are generated to compensate for the dynamic effects caused by the force contact of the MM working tool (WT) with the target objects when performing manipulative operations. To calculate these MM effects, a modified algorithm for solving the inverse dynamics problem is used, which does not require the installation of expensive multicomponent force and torque sensors in the MM WT. The results of numerical simulation in Matlab/Simulink with visualization in the CoppeliaSim simulator showed the operability and high efficiency of the synthesized AUV stabilization system when performing manipulation operations.