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M.Alibani, C.Ferrara, L.Pollini: “Real time Optimal Allocation for I-AUV with Interacting Thrust-ers”, OCEANS 2020 MTS/IEEE Singapore - Gulf Coast, 2020.

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NOTE: presented and awaiting publication

Energy saving is a relevant issue for battery pow-ered Intervention Autonomous Underwater Vehicles whichare designed for both short and long-range mission. Theenergy consumption of an I-AUV is affected by several effectslike hydrodynamics, onboard electronics and thrusters cross-couplings. I-AUVs are usually over-actuated system, thus theactuator’s interaction takes relevance and should take partwithin the energy saving process. In this paper the authorspresent a study on optimal control allocation that aims atconsidering the interactions between the propellers of an overactuated vehicle where usually two or more thrusters caninterfere each other resulting in reduction of the allocationefficiency. The paper presents the mathematical formulationfor interacting propeller considering the wake effect andproposes to dynamically modify the control allocation matrixin order to obtain a cost effective control allocation withoutmodifying the control layer. The existence of a minimum inthe energy consumption during the cruising task in function ofthe parametric control allocation matrix is proved numerically.Thus a perturbation-based extremum seeking approach isused in order to dynamically adapt the parametric allocationmatrix and seek the optimal allocation setpoint without explicitknowledge of the real coupling