HIDEX

The modeling and control of uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs) with atypical hullforms remains a challenging endeavor, with direct relevance to naval autonomy in the nearshore and deep-water regions alike. One of the principle hurdles is the rapid and accurate identification of hydrodynamic components (i.e., added mass and added damping) that impact the maneuvering attributes of these vehicles (Konstantinidis, 2013). Traditional experimental methods, such as the Planar Motion Mechanism (PMM), are limited by the number of simultaneously articulated DOFs and are limited to single-frequency testing, making such systems impractical for resolving frequency-dependent added mass or damping matrices. Thus, to address this and enhance hydrodynamics research at the University of Iowa, a six-degree-of-freedom hexapod (also known as Gough-Stewart platform) is designed, fabricated, controlled and commissioned with impressive capabilities.