Control of Supercavitating Vehicles in the Vertical Plane Using Sliding Mode

Because of supercavitation, there is no buoyancy force to balance the gravity of supercavitating vehicle. In addition, there exists the nonlinear planing force on the vehicle. The motion of vehicle in the vertical plane tends to be unstable and the dynamic model of it is complicated and nonlinear. By introducing a feed-forward compensation and nonlinear state feedback, the nonlinear system could be treated as a multi-input and multi-output (MIMO) linear system. Due to the time-varying factors and un-modelled dynamics of system, the sliding mode control is used to design the controller for motion of supercavitation vehicle in the vertical plane. The results of simulation show the effectiveness of the controller designed in the paper.