II. DYNAMIC MODELING OF AN UNDERWATER GLIDER
A. The Full Dynamic Model
In this paper, we model the fish-like miniature underwater
glider as a rigid-body system, which has an external force
and a moment exerted by an internal movable mass. This is a
simplification with respect to the two-rigid-body system as in
[13], which is partly justified by the fact that, the dynamics of
the movable mass actuated by a closed-loop controlled linear
slider is very fast relative to the dynamics of the gliding body.
m
w
m
mb
mh
rp
rw
Fig. 1. The mass distribution of the fish-like miniature underwater glider
(side view).
As Fig. 1 shows, the stationary body mass ms (excluding the movable mass) has three components: glider hull
mass mh (uniformly distributed), point mass mw for glider
nonuniform hull with displacement rw with respect to the
geometry center (GC), and ballast mass mb (water in the
tank) at GC, which is a simplification since the effect on the
center of gravity caused by the water in the tank is negligible
compared with the moving mass. The movable mass m ¯ ,
which is located at r
p with respect to GC, provides an
external force to the stationary mass system. The mechanism
for the moving mass is a track system fixed along the Oxb
axis inside the glider body and driven by a linear actuator.
The glider body displaces a volume of fluid of mass m . Let
m0 = ms + ¯ m − m represents the excess mass (negative
net buoyancy). The miniature glider will sink if m0 > 0 and
vice versa.
Now we define the related coordinate reference frames.
The body-fixed reference frame, denoted as Oxbybzb and
shown in Fig. 2, has its origin O at the geometry center,
so the origin will also be the point of application for the
buoyancy force. It is convenient to define it this way so the
buoyancy force will not produce a moment. The Oxb axis is
along the body’s longitudinal axis pointing to the head; the
Ozb axis is perpendicular to Oxb axis in the sagittal plane
of the miniature glider pointing downwards, and Oyb axis
will be automatically formed by the right-hand orthonormal
principle. In the inertial frame Axyz, Az axis is along gravity
direction, and Ax is defined in the horizontal plane, while
the origin A is a fixed point in space.
Following the standard convention, we use the rotation
matrix R to represent the rotation operation from the bodyfixed reference frame to the inertial frame. R is parameterized by three Euler angles: the roll angle ϕ, the pitch angle
θ and the yaw angle ψ. Let bi stand for the position vector