The Control of a New Underwater Vehicle with High Stability and Maneuverability in order to Chase the Target

An underwater vehicle, which is able to carry out missions like chasing, hunting, pursuing or going along with a robot or a surface or subsurface organism with appropriate accuracy, must possess high maneuverability. In this article, a new hovering type underwater vehicle is proposed, simulated and controlled in order to chase a surface or subsurface object. With the help of proper control algorithms, the underwater vehicle is able to obtain the necessary information of the target position in order to travel the shortest path to reach the target and also, keep the target within line of sight at all times. In this paper, the controller is first designed and simulated based on a linearized dynamic model and then applied to a nonlinear dynamic model, and finally, the validation has been done. The proposed controller has three loops: A loop to control the path in the vertical plane, a loop to control the path in the horizontal plane and a third controller to control the speed of the robot's advance at a specified value. In order to investigate the controller's resistance, this paper also investigates the effect of currents in the form of disturbance forces on the underwater vehicle.