Optimal thrusters steering for dynamically reconfigurable underwater vehicles

Abstract

When using a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV), on-the-fly reconfiguration of the thrusters orientations allows to adjust its propulsion and manoeuvrability capabilities according to the mission progress. To optimise the actuation, the interaction between thrusters due to cross-flows is modelled and included in the thrust related objective function to be maximised. Run-time effective solutions use a sparse look-up table to initialise a fast direct-search local optimisation algorithm. The found thrusters steering configurations show higher thrust gains compared with the traditional fixed ‘vectored’ configuration of currently available ROVs.