Design, implementation and testing of a bio-inspired propulsion system for autonomous underwater vehicles

Some Autonomous Underwater Vehicles have recently been designed to mimic the locomotion of underwater animals. A new way of propulsion which uses Oscillating Fin Thrusters (OFTs) has been implemented on the AUV Morpheus, with the Nektor module. In particular, first a low level adaptive controller has been developed with the purpose of studying the characteristics of the OFT. Then, a new vehicle using Morpheus' base has been built in order to implement this module and test it. This required for the Lonworks network to be interfaced with QNXnet to create a multi communication protocol vehicle. Concerning the high level control, some proportional controllers and a 6-degree of freedom adaptive controller have been implemented and tested on the new vehicle. The results from these tests have shown that the Nektor module is suitable for the Morpheus, providing high-maneuverability features unavailable when using more standard propulsion systems.