Investigation of the vectored thruster AUVs based on 3SPS-S parallel manipulator

As an extremely significant tool, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) obtain corresponding development which is widely used in the oceanographic survey, military applications and ocean investigation. However, it is rather hard to fulfill missions about ocean exploration in suspended status or at slow speeds for traditional AUVs, due to the effect of the control surfaces trends to decline or even invalid completely in this condition. To overcome the limitation mentioned above, a torpedo-shaped AUV with vectored thrust ducted propeller is presented in this paper, in which the vector thruster is designed based on a 3SPS-S parallel manipulator. The 3SPS-S parallel manipulator, which has merits of compact structure, high reliability, high precision and fast response, is employed for thrust vectoring control mechanism. Additionally, the kinematics and dynamics model of the thrust-vectoring mechanism is constructed, and the MATLAB simulation results show the designed vectored thruster have great application superiority and potential for AUV. Finally, a control scheme of the vectored thruster is designed after considering the case study. The main idea of this paper lies in describing a novel design of the vectored thruster AUV based on 3SPS-S parallel manipulator, which can complete the mission at zero or slow forward speeds.