ECA company has been manufacturing underwater vehicles over the past twenty five years for military applications as well as for civilian activities. OLISTER is a new underwater vehicle dedicated to mine warfare and powered through an umbilical. This paper addresses the identification of the longitudinal, vertical and pitch motion of this vehicle. The parameters which are considered of interest are surge, heave and pitch added inertia and drag coefficient. The identification method is based on Kalman Filtering. Numerical experiments from sea trials are used to achieve the "OLISTER" hydrodynamic identification.
OLISTER is a tethered underwater vehicle designed and produced by ECA for underwater applications. Successful sea trials were realised during 2003 summer off Toulon (France) to characterize the vehicle behaviour and performances. OLISTER is the last teleoperated vehicle designed by ECA besides the successful PAP family, several reduced scale free models of submarines, and AUVs such as ALISTAR 300 and ALISTAR 3000. This paper aims at presenting the work of identification carried out to characterize the hydrodynamic behaviour of "OLISTER", including the approach and the results from sea trials. The paper first briefly presents the OLISTER system, then the models used in surge, heave and pitch. The identification method is outlined in a subsequent section, and finally, some significant results are discussed. A final section presents the conclusions.
The OLISTER system (see fig. 1) is composed of : - a vehicle - a Main Control Console (MCC) - a power supply unit - the umbilical cable used to power the vehicle and to transfer the data between the vehicle and the surface equipment - a tether management system including a winch and a tether guide - a Local Control Console (LCC) used to control the vehicle after launching and during recovery.
