Disturbances caused by unknown dynamics and environmental factors render the automatic control of underwater vehicles extremely challenging. These effects are complex, time varying, and difficult to model accurately, leading to possible instability in the control process. This article focuses on the disturbance rejection problem of an underactuated bionic underwater vehicle … [Read more...] about Bionic Underwater Vehicle: A Data-Driven Disturbance Rejection Control Framework
Biological system modeling
Simulation to Real: Learning Energy-Efficient Slithering Gaits for a Snake-Like Robot
To resemble the body flexibility of biological snakes, snake-like robots are designed as a chain of body modules, which gives them many degrees of freedom (DoF) on the one hand and leads to a challenging task to control them on the other. Compared with conventional model-based control methods, reinforcement learning (RL)-based ones provide promising solutions to design agile … [Read more...] about Simulation to Real: Learning Energy-Efficient Slithering Gaits for a Snake-Like Robot
Controlling Maneuverability of a Bio-Inspired Swimming Robot Through Morphological Transformation
Biology provides many examples of how body adaption can be used to achieve a change in functionality. The feather star, an underwater crinoid that uses feather arms to locomote and feed, is one such system; it releases its arms to distract prey and vary its maneuverability to help escape predators. Using this crinoid as inspiration, we develop a robotic system that can alter … [Read more...] about Controlling Maneuverability of a Bio-Inspired Swimming Robot Through Morphological Transformation
