Underactuated vehicles are vehicles with fewer independent control actuators than degrees of freedom to be controlled. Such vehicles may be used in inspection of sub-sea cables, inspection and maintenance of offshore oil drilling platforms, and similar. This doctoral thesis discusses feedback stabilization of underactuated vehicles. The main objective has been to further develop methods from stabilization of nonholonomic systems to arrive at methods that are applicable to underactuated vehicles. A nonlinear model including both dynamics and kinematics is used to describe the vehicles, which may be surface vessels, spacecraft or autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). It is shown that for a certain class of underactuated vehicles the stabilization problem is not solvable by linear control theory. A new stability result for a class of homogeneous time-varying systems is derived and shown to be an important tool for developing continuous periodic time-varying feedback laws that stabilize underactuated vehicles without involving cancellation of dynamics. For position and orientation control of a surface vessel without side thruster a new continuous periodic feedback law is proposed that does not cancel any dynamics, and that exponentially stabilizes the origin of the underactuated surface vessel. A further issue considered is the stabilization of the attitude of an AUV. Finally, the thesis discusses stabilization of both position and attitude of an underactuated AUV. 55 refs., 28 figs.
Exponential Stabilization of Underactuated Vehicles
1996
113 pages
Report
No indication
English
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