Attitude control for an Hybrid Unmanned Aerial Underwater Vehicle: A robust switched strategy with global stability

This paper presents a method for stabilizing the attitude of a Hybrid Unmanned Aerial Underwater Vehicle. Firstly, we present aerodynamic and hydrodynamic models for the angular motion of our robot, discussing effects like buoyancy force and added inertia. Next, we apply robust control techniques for both environment, aerial and underwater, based on linear uncertain models with only four vertices and well-defined stability criteria, such as D-stability and ℋ₂ performance. Gain matrices K_air and K_wat are computed and the attitude of the vehicle at the hovering operation point for each environment is controlled, respectively. Finally, a procedure is proposed to check the global stability for the switching control case, when the robot changes from air to water (or vice-versa). Numerical simulations with disturbances and switching control are presented to show the stability at different initial conditions.