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. , oceanography, military use, and in the oil and gas industry, and the autonomy of such vehicles is increasing rapidly [1][2][3][4][5]. A basic and highly applicable task for such marine vessels, both surface and underwater, is to follow a general path to perform some mission.The major mission of an underwater vehicle system is to collect information from the underwater environment and send it back to the control center via sensors, for which reliable data transmission is required. Currently, the reliability of sensors is one of the most important challenges for worldwide research and is a new research trend in many application areas. Castaño et al. [6] mentioned that the reliability of sensors and remote sensing systems is a key enabling step toward the massive utilization of sensor networks in all application fields from manufacturing up to maritime and aeronautic applications. Many methods with different properties and considerations for sensor system reliability such as Bayesian approaches, fuzzy set theory, Dempster-Shafer evidence theory, and gray group decision-making were recently studied to address the reliability of sensors using artificial intelligence. However, with the current technology available, underwater communication is an important challenge in the field. Generally speaking, acoustic wave, blue light, and tether cable are three main kinds of approaches applied for underwater communication. In particular, in order to have a real-time and reliable underwater communication over such a distance, using a tether cable could be a better solution for the real-time surveillance mission of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) [7][8][9]. However, the motion of a long flexible cable in water is very complex, in addition to the non-linear dynamic motion of the unmanned surface vehicle (USV) an...

Trajectory tracking with collision avoidance for a multicopter is solved based on geometrical relations. In this paper, a new method is proposed for a multicopter to move from the start position to a desired destination and track a pre-planned trajectory, while avoiding collisions with obstacles. The controller consists of two parts: First, a tracking control is introduced based on the errors between the relative position of the multicopter and the reference path. Second, once the obstacles with a high possibility of collision are detected, a boundary sphere/cylinder of the obstacle is generated by the dimensions of the vehicle and the obstacles, so as to define the safety and risk areas. Afterwards, from the relation between the vehicle’s motion direction, and the tangential lines from the vehicle’s current position to the sphere/cylinder of the obstacle, a collision detection angle is computed to decide the fastest direction to take in order to avoid a collision. The obstacle/collision avoidance control is activated locally when an object is close, and null if the vehicle moves away from the obstacles. The velocity control law and the guidance law are obtained from the Lyapunov stability. In addition, a proportional controller is used at the end of vehicle’s journey to ensure the vehicle stops at the target position. A numerical simulation in different scenarios was performed to prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

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Recently, wind power production has been under the focus in generating power and became one of the main sources of alternative energy. Generating of maximum power from wind energy conversion system (WECS) requires accurate estimation of aerodynamic torque and uncertainties presented in the system. The current paper proposed the generalized high‐order disturbance observer (GHODO) with integral sliding mode control (ISMC) for extraction of maximum power via variable speed wind turbine by accurate estimation of wind speed. The assumption in previous works that considers the aerodynamic torque as slow‐varying is not applicable for the real system. Therefore, the high‐order disturbance observers were designed for precise estimation of uncertainties with fast‐changing behavior. A robust control system was designed to control the speed of the rotor at the optimal speed ratio. The obtained simulation results have shown the better performance characteristics than conventional linear quadratic regulator (LQR) approach. The stability of the proposed algorithm was proven by Lyapunov stability anaysis. Simulations results were obtained in Matlab/Simulink environment.

This paper proposes a new approach to design a fault-tolerant control (FTC) scheme for tracking the optimal power of wind energy conversion systems (WECSs). In this paper, the considered fault will not only impact on actuator but also sensors. As the fault severely affects the performance of WECSs, the FTC are required to be worked accurately and effectively. The polynomial observer, as a part of the proposed FTC system, is synthesized to estimate the aerodynamic torque, electromagnetic torque, and fault simultaneously without using sensors to measure. The information of these parameters is sent back to the LQR (Linear Quadratic Regular) controller of WECSs. Both fault and aerodynamic torque in this study are unnecessary to fulfil any constraint. It should be noted that WECSs is reconstructed to a new form based on the descriptor technique, then the observer will design for this new form instead of the original system. Based on Lyapunov methodology and with the aid of SOS (Sum-Of-Square) technique, the conditions for polynomial observer design are derived in the main theorems. Finally, the simulation results have proved the effectiveness and merit of the proposed FTC method.

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Optimum configuration of a micromixer with two-layer crossing microstructure was performed using mixing analysis, surrogate modeling, along with an optimization algorithm. Mixing performance was used to determine the optimum designs at Reynolds number 40. A surrogate modeling method based on a radial basis neural network (RBNN) was used to approximate the value of the objective function. The optimization study was carried out with three design variables; viz., the ratio of the main channel thickness to the pitch length (H/PI), the ratio of the thickness of the diagonal channel to the pitch length (W/PI), and the ratio of the depth of the channel to the pitch length (d/PI). Through a primary parametric study, the design space was constrained. The design points surrounded by the design constraints were chosen using a well-known technique called Latin hypercube sampling (LHS). The optimal design confirmed a 32.0% enhancement of the mixing index as compared to the reference design.