Drag reduction of the plane Poiseuille flow by partitioned visual servo control

Abstract

We present in this paper a way to minimize the drag of the 2D plane Poiseuille flow. To do that, as in our previous work [1], we use a vision-based approach to estimate the state of the flow. Since visual measurements are used, we propose to exploit visual servoing techniques to derive an efficient control law. Therefore, contrary to the literature concerning drag reduction, we also simultaneously minimize the kinetic energy density of the flow. That is of great importance since the controlled flow may become turbulent when this kinetic energy density is growing. To cope with this problem we propose to design a control law based on partitioned visual servo control. This approach has been first proposed in the robotics community by [2]. Simulations results validate our control scheme. We also compare our approaches with the most relevant ones.