Day: January 12, 2012

Multi-Vehicle Motion Control for Underwater Gliders

Thursday,  Jan.  12,  2012 4:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Room 112, ME-EM Bldg.

Nina Mahmoudian
Department of Mechanical Engineering at Michigan Technological University

There is an increasing interest in having multi autonomous vehicles as mobile sensor networks for data collection for different purposes in air, ground, and water. This seminar will give an overview of the Nonlinear and Autonomous Systems Laboratory (NAS Lab) research activities in this regards.

In water, underwater gliders enabled oceanographers to take measurements underneath the water surface over spatial scales that expand the ocean and time scales that expand months, something that was not possible using satellites and remote sensing. These efficient buoyancy driven vehicles have proven their value in both long-term, basin-scale oceanographic sampling for environmental monitoring and littoral surveillance and military applications.

The problem is to optimize performance  of both individual and multiple glider systems for energy use, time to task completion and efficiency in sensing. This talk will describe the development of efficient motion control system for underwater gliders for autonomous information-rich  data collection. Also, synthesize multivehicle controls for underwater gliders with corrupted limited communication will be presented.