A Novel Thrust Allocation Method for Underwater Robots

Abstract

Underwater vehicles with normal thruster configuration methods are unsatisfying in position-keeping tasks because of their limited manoeuvrability. To this end, this paper proposes an underwater ve-hicle with a novel thruster configuration method and solves the thrust allocation problem by the sequential quadratic programming(SQP) algorithm. Comparisons between the performance of the proposed thruster configuration method and the most widely used config-uration method are given based on the UUVSimulator and Gazebo. Numerical simulations show that vehicle with the proposed thrust configuration method has better performance in manoeuvrability and energy consumption.