Optimal Excitation Trajectories for System Identification of Underwater Vehicles

Abstract

In this work, we propose a structured methodology for the system identification of underwater vehicles through the design of optimal excitation trajectories. To this end, the trajectories are parameterized using Bezier curves, which ensure smooth and differentiable motion profiles while facilitating the enforcement of constraints through appropriate manipulation of the control points. An optimization problem is formulated to determine a dynamically feasible excitation trajectory that respects safety limits and maximizes the quality of the collected data, thereby enabling reliable estimation of the vehicle’s dynamic parameters using least squares. The proposed methodology is experimentally validated in a laboratory water tank, where the dynamic parameters, identified from the optimized trajectory, are evaluated by predicting the vehicle’s velocity through forward simulation on previously unseen trajectories.