Attitude Control of the Hydrobatic Intervention AUV Cuttlefish using Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion
This repo contains the simulation models used in our paper Attitude Control of the Hydrobatic Intervention AUV Cuttlefish using Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion, which was accepted to the 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024).
In this paper, we present an attitude control scheme for an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), which is based on incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI). Conventional model-based controllers depend on an exact model of the controlled system, which is difficult to find, especially for marine vehicles subject to highly nonlinear hydrodynamic effects. INDI trades off model accuracy with sensor accuracy by incorporating acceleration feedback and actuator output feedback to linearize a nonlinear system incrementally. Existing research primarily focuses on studying INDI on unmanned aerial vehicles. However, there is barely any research on controlling marine vehicles using INDI. The control task we are performing is a 90 degrees pitch-up maneuver, where the dual-arm intervention AUV Cuttlefish transitions from a horizontal traveling pose to a vertical intervention pose. We compare INDI to a classical model-based control scheme in the maritime test basin at DFKI RIC, Germany, and we find that INDI keeps the AUV much more steady both in the transitioning phase as well as in the station keeping phase.
Before running the simulation, install the required Python packages:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install python3 python3-pip
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
run
python3 examples/cuttlefish_pose_indi.py
to simulate the pose controller using INDI. The simulation using NDI / Model-Based control can be realized by running
python3 examples/cuttlefish_pose_ndi.py.
In each script there is a parameter section, where you can change the initial conditions, setpoints, controller gains, and the filtering parameters. It is also possible to add Gaussian noise to the sensor readings.
For simulation, two motion models are loaded: One for the simulated vehicle, and one for the controller. The control model can be perturbed by setting motion_model_controller_randomize to a value ranging from 0.0 to 0.8, where 0.8 randomizes each model parameter by 80%.
By increasing the control model perturbation, it can be seen from the plots that it affects the model-based controller much more than INDI.
For completeness, we also provide a simulation for controlling the velocity independent of a controlled pose.
You can run the simulation using INDI by executing python3 examples/cuttlefish_velocity_indi.py, and the simulation using the model-based controller by running python3 examples/cuttlefish_velocity_ndi.py.
Again, feel free to experiment with the parameters in the parameter section and see how each controller behaves for different conditions.
During our experiments, we identified motion models using a linear and a linear-quadratic drag model.
The linear model parameters can be found in models/cuttlefish/cuttlefish_linear_model.yml, and the linear-quadratic model parameters can be found in models/cuttlefish/cuttlefish_quadratic_model.yml.
The work described in this paper has received funding by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (grant no. 01IW22003) as well as the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action (grant no. 03SX540D)
This work has been released under the BSD 3-Clause License. Details and terms of use are specified in the LICENSE file within this repository. Note that we do not publish third-party software, hence software packages from other developers are released under their very own terms and conditions. If you install third-party software packages along with this repo ensure that you follow each individual license agreement.
T. Slawik, S. Vyas, L. Christensen and F. Kirchner (2024). "Attitude Control of the Hydrobatic Intervention AUV Cuttlefish using Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion," in 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024), Abu Dhabi, UAE.
@inproceedings{SlawikIndi2024,
author = {Tom Slawik and Shubham Vyas and Leif Christensen and Frank Kirchner},
title = {Attitude Control of the Hydrobatic Intervention AUV Cuttlefish using Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion},
booktitle = {2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024)},
year = {2024},
address = {Abu Dhabi, UAE}
}