Ocean Engineering Commons^™

Physics-Based Machine Learning Methods For Control And Sensing In Fish-Like Robots, Colin Rodwell

All Dissertations

Underwater robots are important for the construction and maintenance of underwater infrastructure, underwater resource extraction, and defense. However, they currently fall far behind biological swimmers such as fish in agility, efficiency, and sensing capabilities. As a result, mimicking the capabilities of biological swimmers has become an area of significant research interest. In this work, we focus specifically on improving the control and sensing capabilities of fish-like robots.

Our control work focuses on using the Chaplygin sleigh, a two-dimensional nonholonomic system which has been used to model fish-like swimming, as part of a curriculum to train a reinforcement learning agent to …

Simulating The Hydrodynamics Of Offshore Floating Wind Turbine Platforms In A Finite Volume Framework, Maija Benitz

Doctoral Dissertations

There is great potential for the growth of wind energy in offshore locations where the structures are exposed to a variety of loading from waves, current and wind. A variety of computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools, based largely on engineering models employing potential-flow theory and/or Morison's equation, are currently being used to evaluate hydrodynamic loading on floating offshore wind turbine platforms. While these models are computationally inexpensive, they include many assumptions and approximations. Alternatively, high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics models contain almost no assumptions, but at the cost of high computational expense. In this work, CFD simulations provide detailed insight into the …