Study on dynamic behavior of unmanned surface vehicle-linked unmanned underwater vehicle system for underwater exploration

Abstract

This paper focuses on motion analysis of a coupled unmanned surface vehicle (USV)– umbilical cable (UC)–unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) system to investigate the interaction behavior between the vehicles and the UC in the ocean environment. For this, a new dynamic modeling method for investigating a multi-body dynamics system of this coupling system is employed. Firstly, the structure and hardware composition of the proposed system are presented. The USV and UUV are modeled as rigid-body vehicles, and the flexible UC is discretized using the catenary equation. In order to solve the nonlinear coupled dynamics of the vehicles and flexible UC, the fourth-order Runge–Kutta numerical method is implemented. In modeling the flexible UC dynamics, the shooting method is applied to solve a two-point boundary value problem of the catenary equation. The interaction between the UC and the USV–UUV system is investigated through numerical simulations in the time domain. Through the computer simulation, the behavior of the coupled USV–UC–UUV system is analyzed for three situations which can occur. In particular, variation of the UC forces and moments at the tow points and the configuration of the UC in the water are investigated.