Study on maneuvering support system for an amphibian rescue vehicle on the surface of water

Abstract

In this report, we focus on a maneuvering problem of an amphibian vehicle for rescue, and a novel manueuvering support system for the vehicle on the surface of water is proposed by applying a nonlinear state feedback control law for trajectory control. To simplify the problem, we consider only viscous friction among the external forces and ignore other external forces which are applied to the vehicle on the surface of water. We consider that the vehicle should not drift sideways for an excellent driving performance. Thereby, we propose to employ three ducted fans as additional propulsion devices. Each of the two ducted fans, which are attached symmetrically to the left and right side of the vehicle, has a swiveling function in order to generate a lateral force. The other ducted fan, which is attached to the center rear of the vehicle, generates a longitudinal propulsive force. To design a nonlinear state feedback control law, we define ‘Maneuvering Trajectory’ as a trajectory which is generated by the maneuver of the vehicle's pilot and we construct a Lyapunov-like function for the trajectory control system. Then the feasibility of the proposed system is verified by evaluating the tracking error against a reference trajectory through several numerical simulations.

Keywords

• amphibian vehicle
• rescue
• maneuvering support system
• nonlinear control
• trajectory control
• lyapunov-like function