Guidance and Control of Ocean Vehicles,   ISBN:9780471941132

Customer Rating: 

This book is one-of-a-kind, as far as I have been able to determine, in that it is the only book that deals specifically with the guidance and control of marine vehicles. The book deals mainly with the modeling and control of unmanned untethered underwater vehicles (remotely operated vehicles and autonomous underwater vehicles) and high speed craft (surface effect ships and foilborne catamarans). It presents clear concrete mathematical models throughout. It does not drift off into an unreadable "equation jungle" at any point.
The design of modern vehicle guidance and control systems requires knowledge of a broad field of disciplines. Some of these are vectorial kinematics and dynamics, hydrodynamics, navigation systems and control theory. To be able to design a high performance control system it is evident that a good mathematical model of the vehicle is required for simulation and verification of the design. As a result, this book contains a large number of mathematical models intended for this purpose. The book is organized as follows:
The basics of modeling are covered first. Marine vehicle kinematics and dynamics in 6 degrees of freedom are covered in chapter 2 and environmental disturbances in terms of wind, waves, and currents are covered in chapter 3.
Chapter 4 covers the stability and control system design for small unmanned underwater vehicles.
Surface ships are covered in the next two chapters. Ship dynamics, stability, and maneuvering are covered in chapter 5 and ship control system design are covered in chapter 6.
High speed craft are covered in chapter 7 by the study of control system design for surface effect ships (SES) and foilcats.
This book has very good illustrations and block diagrams, a thorough definition of mathematical terminology, and good examples throughout. There are end of chapter exercises that involve both computation and the answering of subjective essay type questions. Unfortunately, no solutions are shown in the book. The computational questions are of such a format and complexity that knowledge of MATLAB would be greatly advantageous for their solution. Although this book is clearly intended for ocean engineering students, from my experience with it any engineer who has had exposure to control theory will probably be able to understand it due to its clear presentation and numerous examples. You should also be acquainted with Lagrangian dynamics since this lends to a cleaner description of ship motion than the Newtonian case and is therefore heavily used by the book. I highly recommend this book to anyone involved in the simulation or control of the behavior of ocean vehicles.