UGSim: Autonomous Buoyancy-Driven Underwater Glider Simulator with LQR Control Strategy and Recursive Guidance System

TL;DR

UGSim is a specialized simulator for buoyancy-driven underwater gliders that integrates LQR control and recursive guidance, enabling efficient development and testing of algorithms without costly sea trials.

Contribution

It introduces a novel simulation platform tailored for buoyancy-driven gliders, addressing hydrodynamic complexities that traditional simulators cannot handle.

Findings

Demonstrated effective simulation of Petrel-II glider dynamics

Validated LQR control strategy performance

Showcased recursive guidance system capabilities

Abstract

This paper presents the UGSim, a simulator for buoyancy-driven gliders, with a LQR control strategy, and a recursive guidance system. Building on the top of the DAVE and the UUVsim, it is designed to address unique challenges that come from the complex hydrodynamic and hydrostatic impacts on buoyancy-driven gliders, which conventional robotics simulators can't deal with. Since distinguishing features of the class of vehicles, general controllers and guidance systems developed for underwater robotics are infeasible. The simulator is provided to accelerate the development and the evaluation of algorithms that would otherwise require expensive and time-consuming operations at sea. It consists of a basic kinetic module, a LQR control module and a recursive guidance module, which allows the user to concentrate on the single problem rather than the whole robotics system and the software infrastructure. We demonstrate the usage of the simulator through an example, loading the configuration of the buoyancy-driven glider named Petrel-II, presenting its dynamics simulation, performances of the control strategy and the guidance system.