Optimal design of hydraulic support landing platform for a four-rotor dish-shaped UUV using particle swarm optimization

Four-rotor dish-shaped unmanned underwater vehicles (FRDS UUVs) are new type underwater vehicles. The main goal of this paper is to develop a quick method to optimize the design of hydraulic support landing platform for the new UUV. In this paper, the geometry configuration and instability type of the platform are defined. Computational investigations are carried out to study the hydrodynamic performance of the landing platform using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method. Then, the response surface model of the optimization objective is established. The intelligent particle swarm optimization (PSO) is applied to finding the optimal solution. The result demonstrates that the stability of landing platform is significantly improved with the global objective index increasing from 1.045 to 1.158 (10.86% higher) after the optimization process.