LAUSR

Abstract This paper presents the system design, dynamic model of a novel coaxial aerial underwater vehicle, and proposes an improved cascade control strategy to enable cross-domain locomotion of the vehicle in disturbance environments. The proposed aerial underwater vehicle merges the design of the coaxial rotor system and the foldable propeller for operating effectively in both mediums and transitioning between them. The vehicle’s continuous dynamics model is formulated based on the Newton-Euler equation considering time-varying environmental disturbances. Then, a predictive and sliding mode cascade control is developed and applied for motion control of the vehicle to perform cross-domain transitions, especially compensating for the effect of buoyancy variance with feedforward control. Finally, the feasibility and robustness of the proposed control scheme are verified by comparative simulation results with the PID controller.