Nonlinear robust control design for a supercavitating vehicle

Supercavitating vehicles can achieve very high speed but also pose technical challenges in maneuvering, system stability and control. Compared to a fully-wetted vehicle for which substantial lift is generated due to vortex shedding off the hull, the supercavitating vehicles are enveloped by gas surface thus the lift is provided by control surface deflections of cavitator and fins, as well as planing force between the vehicle and the cavity. The nonlinearity in the modeling of cavitator, fin, and in particular, the planing force make the control design more challenging. In this paper, a sliding-mode based controller is designed for the longitudinal dynamics of a supercavitating vehicle model. The stability and robustness of the final design are analyzed by the Lyapunov method and verified using simulation. A high-gain observer is also designed to estimate the vertical velocity of the supercavitating vehicle, which is not directly measurable, and then simulation results are presented for the (partial) output-feedback sliding-mode controller.