Abstract
This study addresses the control challenge of ventilated supercavitating vehicles during depth-change maneuvers, where variations in speed and depth induce unsteady cavity evolution and nonlinear planing forces. An unsteady cavity evolution model based on the independent cross-sectional expansion principle was developed and integrated with vehicle dynamics to form a heterogeneous coupled motion framework. A DQN-based controller was designed to maintain cavity length under unsteady conditions, while an ADRC-based pitch controller achieved decoupled attitude control, with depth tracking realized through cascaded outer-loop feedback. Numerical simulations were performed on the established heterogeneous coupled motion model under depth-change maneuvers. The results show that the proposed approach maintains the cavity length within ±10% of the commanded value and achieves rapid and stable depth tracking. The proposed modeling and control framework offers an effective approach to enhance the maneuverability and robustness of ventilated supercavitating vehicles in complex hydrodynamic environments.