Lyapunov-based Guidance of Underwater Autonomous Vehicles for Real Time Pollutant Source Localization

Torres Arosemena, Gabriel A.

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Lyapunov-based Guidance of Underwater Autonomous Vehicles for Real Time Pollutant Source Localization

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This work presents a guidance strategy for an autonomous underwater vehicle to localize, in real-time, an underwater oil plume released in the environment as a Gaussian pulse. For this purpose, it is necessary to select a vehicle design to meet the mission requirements. Therefore, after considering multiple vehicles designs, the OUTLAND-1000, due to its specific configuration, has shown to be a suitable fit for the main purpose of this work. Consequently, a reliable dynamical model is developed from physical principles to include the effects of inertial, hydrostatic, hydrodynamic, and control forces. In addition, as a case study, a synthetic oil spill governed by the advection-diffusion partial differential equation is proposed to describe the dispersion of oil in shallow water. Thus, numerical and analytical schemes are studied to generate a concentration spectrum over a given domain. Regarding guidance and control, reference commands are defined as functions of the localized concentration values and their respective localized gradients. Therefore, the problem is simplified to trajectory tracking problem so that a Lyapunov-based control law capable of dealing with the system nonlinearities and performance requirements is designed. The control method is numerically validated through various source trajectories using existing UAUV specifications while accessing local concentration values and gradients throughout a previously measured pollutant concentration field.

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