Modeling and Speed Control of the Underwater Wheeled Vehicle Flexible Towing System

In this paper, the research contents are mainly focused on the technology of the underwater wheeled vehicle speed control. For providing a passive towed underwater wheeled vehicle with accelerating, uniform motion and decelerating capability which can simulate an underwater navigation environment for the carried unit, we devised a novel open-type hydraulic flexible towing system. Combining the hydrodynamic model of the vehicle and the hydraulic mechanism model, the dynamic characteristics of the novel towing system are studied by computing simulation. Aiming at the force coupling character of double driving hydraulic winches, a master-slave synchronization control strategy is proposed. Then, in view of the flexible towing system features, i.e., strong coupling, nonlinear, time-varying load, and environmental constraints, a real speed controller based on fast terminal sliding mode control theory is designed and manufactured. To verify the effectiveness of the controller, a hardware-in-the-loop simulation test is carried out on the strength of a semiphysical simulation platform based on Matlab/Simulink and VxWorks real-time system. The experiment results show that the speed controller based on fast terminal sliding mode control has excellent effect on rapidity, stability, and anti-interference characteristics.