Design of Gyro Based Roll-Stabilization Controller for a Concept Amphibious Commuter Vehicle

In this master thesis the gyroscopic stabilization of a two-wheeled amphibious concept vehicle is investigated. The key idea is to neutralize external torques applied on the vehicle by the counter torque produced from the two gyroscopes attached on the vehicle. Here the gyroscopes are used as actuators, not as sensors. When a torque is applied in order to rotate a gyroscope whose flywheel is spinning, then the gyroscope precesses and it generates a moment, orthogonal to both the torque and the spinning axis. This phenomenon is known as gyroscopic precession. As the vehicle leans from its upright position we expect to generate sufficient gyroscopic reaction moment to bring the vehicle back and get it stabilized. We first derive the equations of motion based on Lagrangian mechanics. It is worth mentioning that we only consider the control dynamics of a static vehicle. This is the so called regulator problem where we try to counteract the effects of disturbances. The trajectory tracking (servo problem) and the water-travelling can be considered as an extension of the current project. We linearize the dynamics around an equilibrium and we study the stability of the linearized model. We then design an LQG controller, a Glover-McFarlane controller and a cascade PID controller. Regarding the implementation part, we only focus on the cascade PID controller. The results from both simulations and experiments with a small-scale prototype are presented and discussed.MARINTEKNIKDAGAR PÅ KTH 2015