Underwater vehicles get better tests with smooth optimal movement paths
Optimal Excitation Trajectories for System Identification of Underwater Vehicles
Robotics
Summary
Figuring out how underwater vehicles move means testing them carefully. The authors created a way to design smooth and safe movement routes that help gather the best data to study the vehicles’ behavior. They used special curves called Bezier curves to make these routes easy to control and safe for the vehicle. They tested these routes in a lab tank and showed that the data collected helped predict vehicle motion accurately on new tests.
What this means in practice
- •For marine robotics engineers: Design excitation sequences that reliably identify underwater vehicle dynamics to improve control and navigation systems.
- •For autonomous vehicle developers: Generate safe and data-rich testing routes for underwater drones enhancing their performance evaluation procedures.
Authors
Fotis Panetsos, Kostas J. Kyriakopoulos
Abstract
In this work, we propose a structured methodology for the system identification of underwater vehicles through the design of optimal excitation trajectories. To this end, the trajectories are parameterized using Bezier curves, which ensure smooth and differentiable motion profiles while facilitating the enforcement of constraints through appropriate manipulation of the control points. An optimization problem is formulated to determine a dynamically feasible excitation trajectory that respects safety limits and maximizes the quality of the collected data, thereby enabling reliable estimation of the vehicle's dynamic parameters using least squares. The proposed methodology is experimentally validated in a laboratory water tank, where the dynamic parameters, identified from the optimized trajectory, are evaluated by predicting the vehicle's velocity through forward simulation on previously unseen trajectories.