Modeling and simulation of a spherical vehicle for underwater surveillance

This paper presents the modeling and simulation of a spherical autonomous underwater vehicle. The robot was developed under the European Union H2020 innovation action UNEXMIN for the exploration of underground flooded mines, and is a small spherical robot with thrusters and an internal pendulum for pitch control. A model of the vehicle is presented, initially without the pendulum, then an extended formulation is derived accounting for a...