CAREER: Control of Dynamical Systems with Reduced Control Authority and Application to Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

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9502477 Leonard This grant supports a program for integrated research and education activities that address important and challenging engineering problems while at the same time foster a dynamic learning environment in which research motivates and vitalizes education, and education inspires fresh ideas for research and nurtures future leaders. The research centers on nonlinear control of dynamical systems with reduced control authority and application to autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV). The results of the research will have a significant impact on the efficiency and reliability of AUV's which are increasingly in demand as they are expected to play a central role in scientific, environmental, industrial and military underwater missions. At the same time, control of dynamical systems such as AUV's provides an exciting new topic of research that attracts the interest of students and can be used inside and outside the classroom to motivate fundamental learning and to introduce undergraduate and graduate students to innovative research. The goal of the proposed research is to develop a framework for synthesizing control laws to govern the motion of dynamical systems which have a reduced number of independent control inputs as compared to typical usage (also referred to as under-actuated dynamical systems). The reduction in control authority may be the inadvertent result of an actuator failure or the deliberate result of an economic design choice. Accordingly, this research will provide solutions for (1) improving system fault tolerance by exploiting built-in system redundancy and enabling systems to adapt to changes in control authority such as an actuator failure and (2) choosing the number and types of control actuators and actuator configurations in control system designs to best achieve desired performance results. The research is applicable to AUV's as well as to other systems including spacecraft, mobile robots and vibratory actuators. ***