Hydrodynamic and Thruster Model Validation for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

From Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle to the Duke Kahanamoku Aquatic Complex; we develop the theory and generate implementable time efficient trajectories for a testbed autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). This paper is the beginning of the journey from theory to implementation. We begin by considering pure motion trajectories and move into a rectangular trajectory which is a concatenation of pure surge and pure sway. These trajectories are tested using our numerical model and demonstrated by our AUV in the pool. In this paper we demonstrate that the above motions are realizable through our method, and we gain confidence in our numerical model. We conclude that using our current techniques, implementation of time efficient trajectories is likely to succeed.