Novel Design for a Hybrid Aerial Underwater Vehicle

In this paper, we design a novel hybrid aerial underwater vehicle. The vehicle is based on fixed-wing vehicle, hydrofoil and autonomous underwater vehicle, which is capable of navigating in three states: air, water surface and underwater. We design a novel foldable wings mechanism to fold and deploy both sides of the wings in a very short time by a single electric actuator. Then, we consider the aerodynamic characteristics of each wing type and determine all of the wing types. Finally, we conduct computational fluid dynamics simulation of the aerial state of the vehicle to verify the feasibility and stability of aerial flight and underwater submergence of the vehicle.