From Aerobatics to Hydrobatics: Agile Trajectory Planning and Tracking for Micro Underwater Robots

Abstract

Aerobatic quadrotors have been a very active field of research for the last two decades. Their huge community boosted the development of computational light-weight planning and control algorithms. In contrast and despite recent progress, research on agile micro autonomous underwater vehicles (μAUV) is still in its infancy. Both vehicle classes share a close relationship. They achieve high speeds of multiple bodylengths per second. At the same time they are subject to limited onboard resources such as sensors and computing power.In this work, we explore and exploit the potential synergies between aerobatic drones and hydrobatic μAUVs. In order to demonstrate the possible transfer of concepts we build on a state-of-the-art quadrotor trajectory planning framework and extend it to incorporate hydrodynamic effects. Furthermore, we study in a series of experiments the performance of the transferred concepts and show that various quadrotor simplifications match well for hydrobatic μAUVs.