Dr. Kartci: Agile Control of Underwater Robots

Overview

Agile Control of Underwater Robots

Abstract

Underwater Robots have a large area of application – environmental monitoring, an inspection of naval structures, underwater welding, ocean production, object location and recovery, and security. Since over 70% of the Earth's surface is covered by the ocean, and yet a very small percentage has been explored by scientists, high agile maneuver driving and high-performance controllers have become a necessity. To achieve such performance, two challenges must be solved considering unpredictable external disturbances caused by underwater currents, tether, and payload, the nonlinear system dynamics, underwater position systems’ resolution and refresh rates, etc. The first is to have fewer control inputs than a degree of freedom and the second is the flow around an underwater robot during maneuvering. Thus, in this talk, solution strategies that use optimal control are highlighted. The dynamical model of our underwater robot is derived. The experimental work will be demonstrated.

Biography

Aslihan Kartci is a postdoctoral fellow at the Distributed Systems and Autonomy (DSA) group of the Robotics, Intelligent Systems, and Control Laboratory (RISC Lab) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. She received her Ph.D. degree in Electronics from the Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic in 2019 and M.S. degree from Yildiz Technical University, Turkey, in 2015. Kartci’s research focuses on the import of concepts from fractional calculus into circuit theory especially in regards to their applications in controller design, underwater robots, analog signal processing, modeling materials i.e. biological tissues, fractional-order elements, and their measurement.