Motion planning and control of a swimming machine

The maneuvering control of an aquatic vehicle using an oscillating foil as the propulsion system is considered. The control task is decomposed into the off-line step of motion planning and the online step of feedback tracking. Optimal control techniques are used for obtaining a repertoire of time scalable and concatenable primitive motions. The computed optimal motion plans are regulated by a controller that consists of a cascade of linear quadratic regulator, input-output feedback linearization and sliding mode control. Complete maneuvers are obtained by concatenating and executing time scaled copies of primitive motions. The motion planning and control scheme was experimentally tested for longitudinal maneuvers